Chicago weekend toll: 23 shot, including 5 children 15 and younger

Madeline Buckley Contact Reporter Chicago Tribune


Five children 15 and younger were among 23 people shot during a scorching weekend in Chicago.
From Friday afternoon to early Monday, 21 people were wounded and two people were killed, including a 14-year-old boy who was shot early Saturday while walking in the Washington Park neighborhood, according to police.
About nine hours earlier, another 14-year-old boy was shot in the Loop. He was coming up stairs at the corner of Wabash Avenue and Wacker Drive when he was shot in the leg Friday evening, police said.
Late Sunday night, three girls ages 5, 14 and 15 were shot while sitting in a parked car with their mother in the East Garfield Park neighborhood, police said. Three other people were injured in the attack, which that police said was gang-related.
The weekend’s other homicide happened early Sunday morning when 32-year-old Deantate Neshonellitt LeJohn, of the 6800 block of South Honore Street, was shot in the leg and crashed into a pole while driving in the Marquette Park neighborhood on the Southwest Side. He was pronounced dead at 5:57 a.m.
While the city was under a heat warning much of the weekend, with temperatures reaching into the 90s, shootings were about half of what they were last weekend, when nearly 40 people were shot.
Speaking after the six people were shot in East Garfield Park, Area North Deputy Chief Al Nagode said the city had deployed a “a tremendous amount of resources” over the weekend.

So far this year, at least 1,378 people have been shot in Chicago, and there have been at least 244 homicides, according to Tribune data. Shootings and homicides remain down from 2016 and 2017, years of record-breaking violence, but are higher than other recent years.

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