65-year-old man shot on bus in Austin, adding to violent day on CTA

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A 65-year-old man was shot on a CTA bus Saturday evening in the West Side Austin neighborhood, adding to a violent day on the city’s public transportation system.

He was on the bus just after 6 p.m. when he heard gunshots and felt pain in the 5600 block of West Division, according to Chicago Police.

The man got off the bus and was walking home when he realized he was bleeding, police said. He went to West Suburban Medical Center in Oak Park, and was transferred to Stroger Hospital when his gunshot wound was found.

No one was in custody as Area North detectives investigated.

The shooting was the latest in a handful of violent incidents on or near CTA property this weekend.

Just five minutes after the shooting on the bus in Austin, a man was grazed by a bullet in the right eye and hand while riding a CTA Green Line train on the South Side. The shooting happened when a fight broke out and someone opened fire on the moving train.

Saturday afternoon, a man was shot to death at a bus stop near a the CTA’s 69th Street Red Line station in the South Side Englewood neighborhood. During an ensuing argument, a person pulled out a gun and shot the man in his chest.

In July, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of CTA and police data from the beginning of 2015 through mid-April 2017 found serious crime on the CTA in the city went up 16 percent in 2016. More than 90 percent of those serious crimes went unsolved.

Another Sun-Times investigation in November found reports of “non-index” crime — those regarded as less severe than “index” crimes such as murder, robbery and rape — on the CTA in Chicago were on pace in 2017 to surpass each of the previous two years. That included the number of cases of “criminal sexual abuse” such as “inappropriate touching” and “sexual harassment without physical contact.”

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