‘We’re still hurt. We’ll be that way for the rest of our lives.’
Vigil organizer reflects on trauma’s long-term effects
A mass shooting at a vigil on Halloween night turned deadly Friday when a 48-year-old man, who friends said had been clinging to life support since the shooting, died at Mount Sinai Hospital, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
Pierre Riley was a friend of the woman who was being honored that night, said Cherice Patterson, who organized the vigil on the city’s West Side.
Patterson was at home Friday afternoon, reflecting on the chaotic Halloween mass shooting attack that left 14 people shot, including herself, a sister and her cousins: two brothers who are 3 and 13 years old. Another woman was injured by a car as she fled the scene.
Patterson, 40, personally knows all the victims and is related to many, she said. She orchestrated the gathering in the East Garfield Park neighborhood on Halloween out of love for her cousin, 38-year-old Shakia Lucas, who had suddenly passed away after complications to a surgery.
“I’m mentally OK. Physically hurt and scarred, but I’m alive,” Patterson said.
Lucas was diabetic and had a surgery to insert a tube in her body. After she returned home, her body became infected so badly that she died. “Something went wrong,” Patterson said.
They held the vigil after a Halloween party that night. The kids who were shot had been wearing costumes just hours earlier.
When asked how any sense can be made of what happened, Patterson said it can’t, and that their agony is never going to subside.
“You want to ask why, but you know, it’s just devastating … that someone would purposely do something like that,” she said of the shooters.
“You sit in your car and you ride in this neighborhood and you see women and children and you rightfully have the choice: ‘Hey, I can do this or not.’ You have to be a complete monster to visually see women and kids and purposely shoot,” Patterson said.
The Halloween vigil shooting had the highest number of victims in a single Chicago shooting incident since March 2021, when two people were killed and 13 others were injured at a “pop-up party” in the Park Manor neighborhood. Four guns were recovered from that scene. It was the second shooting within a year to have 15 victims in Chicago.
In July 2020, 15 people were shot outside a Gresham funeral home. In that shooting, a car drove down 79th Street and at least two inside opened fired at a group of people who were lined up to mourn a man named Donnie Weathersby. The victims in that shooting ranged in age from 21 to 65, and it included 10 women. Two were in critical condition from the attack. Police linked the shooting to a retaliatory cycle of gang violence.
Despite the numbers, these mass shootings did not reach the scope of coverage that followed this year’s Fourth of July shooting in suburban Highland Park, where seven people were killed and 48 others were injured by bullets or shrapnel when a man fired a rifle from a rooftop down at parade spectators.
Claudio S. Rivera, a University of Chicago assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience who grew up in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, said a trauma from a mass shooting should be taken into context. It’s unfair, he said, to compare how a community like Highland Park may respond to a mass shooting with East Garfield Park, where there has been a series of chronic trauma due to the deprivation and abandonment of those communities.
“We failed to do more harm than good by only focusing on (the mass shooting) and not focusing on the context and history of what these communities have been dealing with,” Rivera said. “The social murder that has occurred as a result of deprivation of these communities is just accepted as part of the day to day and we shift our gaze to these communities until one of these spectacular events occurs.”
At the vigil on Halloween night, the group, many of whom were women and children, stood on the corner of South California Avenue and West Polk Street at about 9:20 p.m. when two people inside a dark SUV began shooting, police said. The vehicle, possibly an Audi sedan, fled south.
One victim, Lakita Kent, 34, remains hospitalized after being hit by a car while trying to escape. “The shooter hit her with a car,” Patterson believes. “She was hit and dragged pretty bad.”
Nine of the victims, including an 11-year-old girl and five women, were recovering at home, but four, including Kent, were still hospitalized Friday.
Patterson’s 13-year-old cousin remains at Mount Sinai and is still not walking.
“He’s in a lot of pain,’’ Patterson said. His brother, 3, is now home after he was shot, too.
“They had gone trickor-treating in a place next door, that’s why these kids were out. It was a party for these kids,” she said, adding the 13-year-old is also “distraught” because he lost his Kyrie Irving basketball shoes during the melee.
Rivera said a mass shooting can cause a child a lot of confusion and to question whether their safety can be provided or maintained. If a child is involved in a tragedy like a mass shooting, the support network needs to help restore the child’s social contract that the world will keep them safe, he said.
“That’s best done with communities when they have resources because they can provide them with that predictability, that safety, that structure,” he said. “Young kids are still trying to learn about the world that way. And if we don’t repair that, or if we don’t prevent the traumas from happening for them, it can lead to a lot of negative mood and can affect their hope for the future.”
The proper response to trauma in children should not just be to teach the child mental health skills but to also address the rest of the child’s environmental conditions that can exacerbate their trauma, Rivera said.
In this event, where a lot of the victims were within the same social circle, it can put a strain on the community because social connections and relationships are one of the key components to help people overcome trauma, Rivera said. The fact that this happened to one social circle may increase the likelihood that they have fewer resources available not only for their own coping but in being able to help each other and the children.
“The surrounding community and communities like it who’ve experienced those tragedies or similar ones then start to have those trauma reminders for themselves, and are feeling a sense of injustice or a sense of lack of fairness in the world,” he said, adding that people recognize that this pattern is not accidental.
Patterson’s sister, 47-yearold Conttina Patterson, was undergoing surgery Friday. “She’s having a skin graft,” Patterson said of Conttina, who was also shot in the leg.
A man in his late 30s was shot in the chest “and a couple more places,” she said. He is also still hospitalized.
Patterson struggled to understand what possessed the shooters to attack.
“This is a hateful thing to do. To me, it’s a lie. What: You hate women and kids?”’ she asked the shooters.
“We’re not affiliated with a gang or a fight. We don’t know what’s going on. For you to open fire, there’s no excuse. There’s no excuse,” Patterson said. “I pray that they get caught.”
The brothers are going to be affected for the rest of their lives, she said. But “they have a great mom,” Patterson added.
As far as her injuries go, Patterson will receive physical therapy. She has three bullets still inside her leg. “It’s safer that way for now,” she said the doctors believe. “But I’m just in pain.”
“I’m on a walker. I have big holes in me. I reached down last night and I felt the bullet on the side of my leg, I was terrified.”
She will be sidelined from work as a hairdresser and decorator because she can’t stand.
“We’re still hurt. We’ll be that way for the rest of our lives.”
“I pray that they get caught. You hurt these children. You hurt us and we’re traumatized forever.”
“You sit in your car and you ride in this neighborhood and you see women and children and you rightfully have the choice: ‘Hey, I can do this or not.’ You have to be a complete monster to visually see women and kids and purposely shoot.” — Cherice Patterson, who organized the vigil on the city’s West Side