‘We’re losing all our families:’ Woman killed, teen injured in Jeffery Manor shooting

A woman was killed and a teen wounded in a shooting Friday night in Jeffery Manor.

Kristen Carr, 41, and a 14-year-old boy were walking through a vacant lot in the 2300 block of East 100th Street about 9:50 p.m. when someone driving a black SUV approached the pair and opened fire, Chicago police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office said.

Carr was shot in the hip and taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she later died, police said.

The teen was shot in the shoulder and taken to Comer Children’s Hospital, where he was listed in good condition, police said. No one was in custody.

Tamiko Ross, Carr’s older cousin, said the 14-year-old who was shot was Carr’s son Dante, who is now at home recovering.

According to Ross, her boys — Dante and his 4-year-old brother — were everything to Carr.

“She enjoyed taking care of her boys, that was her life right there,” Ross, a Washington Heights resident, said. “She was always there for them, just always doing her motherly duties.”

Ross said her family had faced significant loss in the last year even before Carr’s death. Ross’ mother, aunt and Carr’s father had all died in the last year, prompting the family to come together more frequently than usual.

“We’d always say, ‘We need to get together not when someone dies,’” Ross said, adding that the last time she saw Carr was at her father’s funeral. “Look at us now.”

But Ross noted there’s a distinct difference between the losses they’ve faced and the one in front of her family now:

“It hurts [more] when someone murders somebody. They took her life for what?” Ross said. “The other [deaths], they died from sickness, but she’s coming back from the store, and they just shoot because … it’s just senseless.”

Ross also knows her family isn’t alone in losing a family member to violence. By noon Saturday, Carr was one of seven people killed and 13 injured in shootings across the city. The day before Carr was killed, another 14-year-old boy was also shot in Jeffery Manor.

“We’re losing all our families,” Ross said. “It’s not just us, our family, other families are losing people to violence, [too]... You see it, you know it and you know people it happens to. It’s happening everywhere in Chicago.”

With continued violence also have come social media pages where neighbors share tip lines and grieve the loss of people they may or may not know. Ross said she follows the news but never anticipated seeing a familiar face.

“I never expected to see my cousin’s picture on [the news pages],” Ross said. “But when you see it the next day on Facebook it’s not a dream anymore.”