At least 13 people were wounded across the city from Friday evening through Saturday afternoon, including a 3-year-old boy who was shot in the head on the West Side on Friday, according to authorities.
The boy was in a closet with at least one other child when a gun discharged, police said.
The 3-year-old’s shooting happened at about 7:30 p.m. in an apartment on the 4300 block of West Monroe Street in the city’s West Garfield Park neighborhood.
Police said the boy’s father took the gun and remaining ammunition and fled the scene. It was unclear whether the boy’s mother was home during the shooting. The child was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital in critical condition.
Police said Saturday night that they were questioning a person of interest in the incident.
Tammy McNeal, who identified herself as a chaplain with the nearby New Mount Pilgrim Missionary Baptist Church, said she was driving through the neighborhood to recruit women to join a Bible study group when people began running from near the scene.
“And then I heard screams saying somebody’s been shot,” she said.
The boy was brought from the house in a small stretcher, she said. She put her hands about 2 feet apart to show his size.
“He was not even long enough to fill the stretcher,” McNeal said. “His body was so small. He was so tiny. Everybody was just like, ‘Wow.’ It was just sad.”
Other shootings occurred in West Pullman, Marquette Park, Jeffery Manor, West Town, South Deering, on Lake Shore Drive close to the Park West neighborhood and near the border of the city’s Back of the Yards and Englewood neighborhoods.
An 18-year-old was shot early Saturday morning in the 2700 block of West 24th Street, just west of Washtenaw Avenue, in the Little Village neighborhood on the Southwest Side. It was at least the third shooting near the intersection this year.
The block is a gang hangout, which has prompted residents to request a blue-light police camera from the city. Walls in the area are caked with layers of paint used to cover over gang graffiti, some of it still fresh Saturday morning.
Tribune reporters Jeremy Gorner and Gregory Pratt contributed.