Chicago shootings surpass 2016 pace

Homicides are up 23.5% from same period last year.

Shootings and homicides in Chicago are higher than this time last January, a month that marked the deadliest start to a year in the city in nearly two decades.

As of early Monday, at least 228 people were shot in Chicago so far this year, a 5.5 percent increase from the 216 shot in the same time last year. There have been at least 42 homicides, up 23.5 percent from the 34 homicides from the same period in 2016.

Last January closed with 50 homicides, the most for that month in the city in at least 16 years, according to police statistics. The year ended with 783 homicides, the most since 1996, according to data collected by the Chicago Tribune.

This January has seen several violent weekends. Over the New Year’s weekend, 55 people were shot, five of them fatally. The next weekend saw a sharp drop, two killed and seven wounded. Over the following Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, 39 people were shot, 10 of them fatally.

This past weekend 54 people were shot, six of them fatally. There were seven attacks that wounded three or more people, according to police.

In West Englewood on Sunday afternoon, a group of people in a convenience store heard gunfire and ran outside. Four shooters opened fire in their direction, wounding four people, including a 56-year-old woman who was listed in critical condition after being shot several times in the left leg, police said

Three people were shot as they sat in a car in West Town on Sunday morning, police said. A few hours earlier, three people were shot in The Gap neighborhood.

On Saturday, there were three separate shootings each with three victims, all on the West Side, police said. Late Friday, three men in their 20s were shot in the South Austin neighborhood.

Among the fatal shootings was a woman believed to be in her 20s who was shot early Monday in front of an elementary school in South Austin. Police found her with a gunshot wound to the head and she was pronounced dead at the scene.

Police announced charges in one shooting: a South Chicago domestic attack that left a woman with gunshot wounds to the wrist, foot and thigh. The shooter forced the woman and her two children into a car, then crashed. The alleged shooter and the woman were hospitalized.

SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES Crosses sit in a vacant lot Monday in the Englewood neighborhood in Chicago. Each cross, created by Greg Zanis, represents a victim of murder in Chicago in 2017. This January has seen several violent weekends in the city.