Halloween Weekend Shootings in Chicago Up 30 Percent From Last Year

Nick Kangadis | October 29, 2018
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Maybe once Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel steps away from the mayor’s office at the end of his current term, Chicago might be able to see a change in terms of the amount of violence seen of the city’s West and South sides.

This past weekend, which many parents around the country observed as the right weekend to celebrate Halloween with their children, saw a frightening uptick in shootings from last year’s Halloween weekend.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported 43 people were victims of gunshots over the weekend, with five people losing their lives. Thirty-eight others were wounded in shootings across the Chicagoland area.

Weekend shootings are typically kept track of between 5 p.m. Friday evening to 5 a.m. Monday morning. That means that 43 people were shot in 60 hours in the Windy City.  This is up 30 percent from 2017’s Halloween weekend, which saw two people murdered and another 28 wounded.

Here’s an example of this past weekend’s violence, according the Chicago Sun-Times:

Earlier that morning [Sunday], a teenage boy died during a drive-by attack in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood on the South Side. John Pena, 16, was walking in an alley about 2:15 a.m. in the 6200 block of South Maplewood when someone drove up in a car and fired shots, Chicago police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office said. Pena was shot in the chest and shoulder and was taken to University of Chicago Medical Center, where he died. He lived in the Little Village neighborhood.

I’m not exactly sure anymore what can be done in my hometown to remedy the situation that Chicago continuously finds itself in. Maybe the self-removal of Emanuel, who typically seems to worry more about appeasing the illegal immigrants that inhabit the city than fixing the problems, will lead to some kind of change in the poisonous mentality currently plaguing the city.

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