It’s impossible to imagine the thought process that led to this. It’s Halloween, about 5:30 p.m., when streets and sidewalks across Chicago are teeming with costumed children holding bags of candy in one hand, a parent’s hand in the other. They feel safe because … it’s Halloween.
A gunman hiding in an alley spots a gang rival across the street. The rival is walking amid a group of children trick-or-treating. Nearby is a 7-year-old girl dressed in what looked to be a Minnie Mouse outfit, walking with her father. Unfathomably, the gunman fires.
He fires at someone in a crowd of trick-or-treating children.
The rival is shot in the hand. Bullets hit the 7-year-old girl in the neck and chest. “My little girl’s been shot!” her father screams. A woman in a cellphone store rushes the girl and her family into the store, using one hand to hold the girl’s hand and the other to stem the bleeding from her chest.
“She was looking at me, and I was calling her name,” the woman told the Tribune. “She was holding my hand for three minutes, and then she let me go.”
The scene played out in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood Thursday night. As of this writing, the girl was hospitalized in critical but stable condition. The gunman and two other people with him fled and haven’t been caught.
Questions for that man and his accomplices: How do you decide to knowingly fire into a crowd of children? How do you decide to take a child’s Halloween evening of carefree giddiness, and turn it into a night of terror?
This city has been here before. Rival gang members turning side streets filled with families into zones of urban warfare. Retaliation that claims innocents — people simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. A rationalization by gunmen that, in the barbarous world of tit-for-tat gang violence, collateral damage is acceptable.
Chicagoans hope and pray the girl in a hospital bed with bullet holes in her neck and chest heals, both physically and psychologically.
Chicago police Superintendent Eddie Johnson called the girl’s shooting “reprehensible,” adding the people responsible “do not deserve to live in our city.” Tips from community members have been “overwhelming.” Friday afternoon, police said they were questioning a juvenile.
For Johnson, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, and the rest of this city, there’s no higher priority than road-mapping a way toward a more peaceful, safe Chicago, a time when a child’s Halloween evening can unfold with joy and peanut butter cups. Not fear.
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