Christmas weekend in Chicago proved to be an especially deadly one: 11 people were killed and 43 were wounded in shootings across the city over the holiday weekend, lasting Friday night to early Monday morning, police said.
The Chicago Sun-Times, citing police figures, reported that the figure represents a jump from 2015, when six were killed and 30 were wounded. It’s also worth noting that Christmas in 2015 was a four-day weekend, whereas it was a three-day weekend this year.
The most recent murder took place at 9:20 p.m. local time on Sunday in the city’s South Side’s East Chatham neighborhood during a mass shooting that left two men dead and five others wounded. The shooting occurred as people gathered for a party when an assailant wearing a gray hooded sweatshirt walked from an alley and opened fire before fleeing the scene.
An 18-year-old man, identified as James Gill, and a 21-year-old man, Roy Gill, were killed during the incident, the Chicago Tribune reported. Other reports indicated the two were brothers.
After midnight on Saturday, 27-year-old Juan Gonzalez was gunned down as he was walking in the Brighton Park neighborhood as he was streaming a Facebook live video. “When they shot at him, that’s when everything just cut off,” his sister said of the clip, according to the Tribune.
UPDATE: 33 shot, 9 fatally, in Christmas weekend shootings across Chicago since Friday evening https://t.co/I7Hl3hyWxj pic.twitter.com/BTJvXTOVRe
— FOX 32 News (@fox32news) December 26, 2016
In another incident, five teenagers were shot within a few feet of each other in the South Austin neighborhood at around 3:30 p.m. on Friday. Their conditions were listed as stable at the time of publication.
The first homicide occurred on Friday evening when two males were shot and killed around the South Austin block where the two both lived. They went outside after a phone call and then gunshots were heard.
According to the Sun-Times and Tribune, seven other people were killed over the holiday weekend.
Local website DNAInfo’s tally shows that 730 people have been killed in 2016—a dramatic increase since 2015 when there were 495 homicides. The Tribune, meanwhile, said that 4,307 people have been shot in 2016. In 2015, 2,989 were shot.
