Driver in 2011 shooting that injured girls in park gets six years

The getaway driver in a gang-related shooting that injured two girls as they played in a sandbox at Avondale Park was sentenced to six years in prison Thursday after he pleaded guilty to aggravated battery with a firearm.

Dionisio Gonzalez, 36, admitted his role in the June 8, 2011, crime before Cook County Judge Kevin Sheehan, according to court records.

Gonzalez’s co-defendant, gunman Antonio Bucio, 27, is serving a 30-year sentence.

After the 2-year-old girl suffered a graze wound and a 7-year-old was wounded in the back, then-Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy declared war on the Maniac Latin Disciples.

“We’re going to obliterate that gang,” McCarthy told police brass then. “Every one of their locations has to get blown up until they cease to exist.”

Bucio and Gonzalez, Maniac Latin Disciples, were targeting two Latin King rivals in the 3500 block of West School, prosecutors said after Gonzalez’s arrest last year.

Bucio, who was in a maroon van with Gonzalez and four others, jumped out, fired at the men he had just exchanged gang signs with, prosecutors said. But instead of striking his rivals, he shot the girls with his .45-caliber handgun.

Bucio jumped back into the van that Gonzalez drove away. Gonzalez ended up parking the car in the 2800 block of Francisco and ran away, prosecutors said.

Bucio eventually admitted that he pulled the trigger because the two Latin Kings he and his friends encountered had “disrespected his gang.”

Gonzalez, meanwhile, had fled to Florida.

Authorities returned him to Chicago in November 2015 after he was arrested for possession of cannabis and resisting arrest.