Sixty shot in Chicago over weekend as city's gun violence continues to rise

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/may/31/chicago-memorial-day-weekend-shootings-gun-violence

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At least 60 people were shot, six fatally, over the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago.

That is fewer homicides than the holiday weekend last year, when 12 people were killed, but the overall shooting rates in Chicago continue to be higher than the year before, according to the Chicago Tribune’s ongoing tally.

This weekend’s victims include Veronica Lopez, a 15-year-old killed early Saturday morning.

At North-Grand high school on Tuesday, students returned to classes in blue and white clothes, the same colors Lopez was wearing when she was fatally shot while sitting in the passenger side of a car on Lakeshore Drive. They held a vigil for their fellow student, a few days before the end of the school year.

“I just want my baby back, she was everything,” Lopez’s mother, Diana Mercado, told reporters.

Police said the vehicle’s driver, a 28-year-old man, has known gang ties. He was also struck in the shooting but managed to drive to a hospital and receive treatment.

Memorial Day weekend, which falls midway through the year, is an annual, unofficial indicator of a city’s gun violence landscape, as the warmer summer weather is typically met with a jump in crime rates. In New York City, at least one person was fatally shot and 16 others injured in shootings over the weekend.

But shooting rates in other major cities continue to pale in comparison to those in Chicago, the third-largest city in the US. While fewer homicides occurred in Chicago over the holiday weekend compared to last year, in the first five months of 2016, more people were shot each month than in the same month a year earlier.

This time last year, 957 people had been shot, according to the Tribune. On Tuesday, the number for 2016 was around 1,500, the newspaper said.

The weekend culminated with two separate fatal shootings of two men around 11pm on Monday. Police said James Taylor, 44, was killed on the South Side and Johan Jean, 39, was killed on the Far North Side.

The Chicago police department said most of the victims were on a “strategic subject list” of people more likely to be involved in a shooting. The department’s analysis looks at criminal records, gang affiliations, information from past shootings and past contacts with police to determine whether someone should be on the list because they are a likely assailant, or victim.

The department told local news station CBS Chicago that about 1,500 people are on the list and the department is trying to contact them before a shooting occurs.

Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told the Tribune that the department can “never say it’s good until we can go an entire Memorial Day weekend without a single shot being fired”.

The department’s final tally of weekend gun violence is planned for release later on Tuesday.