It rose to 80 degrees in Chicago on Saturday, the warmest day of the year so far, and a spasm of gunfire quickly followed.
Over 36 hours, at least 36 people were shot.
The Chicago Sun-Times noted that “shootings each weekend for the last four weeks have risen steadily: 17, 19, 25” and now had set a record in the 30s.
Beyond the shock of the sheer numbers involved, the individual stories are heart-wrenching.
Jasmine Martinez, 24, “was shot twice in the head early Sunday while driving on the West Side,” the Sun-Times reported. “She was clinging to life at Stroger Hospital on Sunday, but doctors told her mother, Myrna Flores, that her daughter was brain dead and there was not much hope.”
“How are we going to tell her kids?” her mother said. “She has a son who is 1 and a daughter who is 9.”
I am living near the University of Chicago on the city’s South Side this spring, and if you thought the weekend shootings would dominate conversation on Monday, you were wrong.
CONTINUE READING AT SUNTIMES.COM
