Chicago’s July Fourth weekend ends with 17 dead, 70 wounded
CHICAGO – One of Chicago’s bloodiest holiday weekends in memory ended with 17 people fatally shot, including a 7-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy, and 70 more wounded, despite a concerted effort to quell the violence with an additional 1,200 police officers on the streets.
The violence was far worse than last year, when the long July Fourth weekend ended with six people dead and 66 wounded in gunfire. And the holiday weekend of violence follows Chicago’s deadliest Memorial Day weekend since 2015.
After a relatively peaceful Friday, gunfire erupted around 7 p.m. Saturday. Seven-year-old Natalia Wallace was standing on the sidewalk outside her grandmother’s house on the city’s West Side during a Fourth of July party when, according to police, suspects climbed from a car and opened fire. The child was shot in the head.
“Bullets just came from nowhere,” Natalia’s grandmother, Linda Rogers, told the Chicago Tribune on Sunday. “I came out here and my grandbaby (was) lying on the ground.”
Natalia’s death came amid a spate of shootings around the United States that left several children dead, including a 6year-old boy in San Francisco, a 6-yearold boy in Philadelphia, an 8-year-old girl in Atlanta, an 11-year-old girl in Columbia, Missouri, and an 8-year-old boy in Hoover, Alabama.
Chicago Police said detectives used technology to find the gunman’s vehicle, and they arrested the one man who was sitting inside. The man had not been charged in Natalia’s death as of Monday morning, and his name was not released. The department did not immediately know how many, if any, arrests have been made in the other weekend homicides.
About three hours after Natalia was shot, a group of young men police believe are members of a gang jumped from a vehicle and opened fire on a rival gang member.
“They shot and killed him, and they stand over him and keep shooting” before jumping back in the car and fleeing the scene, Deputy Chief Brendan Deenihan told reporters Monday morning.
But a child, 14-year-old Vernado Jones Jr., was nearby, and one of the bullets fired at the man who was killed struck Vernado in the armpit.
“He had nothing to do with gang-ongang violence. He was not the intended target,” Deenihan said.
A visibly upset and angry Police Superintendent David Brown lamented the growing roster of children who fall victims to gun violence.
“We cannot allow this to be normalized in this city,” he said. “We cannot get used to hearing about children being gunned down in Chicago every weekend.”
This year, the department counted the July Fourth weekend shootings from 6 p.m. Thursday through the end of Sunday. In all, 13 children under the age of 18 were shot, including the two who died.
The violence highlighted what has been a particularly dangerous year for children in the city. Police statistics show there have been 32 homicide victims under 18 so far in 2020 compared to 20 in the same period in 2019.