Chicago Police: 4 Dead, 1 Injured in Apartment Shooting

A stock photo of police tape. (Jeff Karoub/File via AP)

Four people were shot and killed while eating dinner inside their Chicago apartment on the Northwest Side, according to local reports. A woman is in critical condition.

The Chicago Sun-Times reported that the shooting took place at 5:30 p.m. on Saturday.

First Deputy Superintendent Anthony Riccio told the Chicago Sun-Times a 67-year-old man with a history of problems with his neighbors is now in custody.

The official told the paper that he went into the apartment and shot three men and a woman as they ate dinner. He then went into a separate unit and shot another woman.

One victim is in critical condition, officials told the paper.

Chicago Police officers outside of the Chicago Mercy Hospital in a stock photo. (Kamil Krzaczynski/AFP/Getty Images)

Ricco said the man had a history of complaints lodged against other residents.

However, investigators “don’t know what set him off,” Ricco told the Sun-Times.

Riccio said he has lived in the apartment building for around 15 years, ABC7 reported.

The 6700 block of W. Irving Park Road (Google Street View)

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said that the mass shooting is “devastating and almost unfathomable” on Twitter Saturday. “We mourn the loss, honor the victims, and continue the hard but necessary work of keeping our neighborhoods safe,” she also said.

All of the victims in the case are adults. The investigation is ongoing.

Facts About Crime in the United States

Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).

The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.

The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.

The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.

While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.