A father of two was shot and killed early Sunday morning in the Lawndale neighborhood on the West Side, police said.
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About 1:25 a.m., police officers responded to a call of a person shot near the intersection of 13th Street and South Central Park Avenue to find the man lying on the ground unresponsive.
Fredrick Lee Blount, 33, suffered a gunshot wound to the head and was pronounced dead at the scene, police said. Blount, who lived in the 3200 block of West Monroe Street, was pronounced dead at 1:45 a.m., according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office, which gave the spelling of his first name as Frederick.
Police said Blount was standing next to his red Audi Q7, which was parked on the east side of Central Park, when he was shot. He ran across the street and collapsed by a stop sign on the south side of 13th and Central Park, police and family said.
At the scene of the shooting, police officers cordoned off the intersection of 13th and South Central Park with yellow and red tape.
Police found five shell casings near the Audi, which stood parked with its lights on. Bloodstains trailed from the middle of the street to Blount’s body, which was covered with a sheet.
As police officers investigated the scene, more than two dozen family members, friends and neighbors gathered mostly on the north side of the crime scene.
A woman dressed in a jeans jacket and black pants stood in the middle of Central Park next to the yellow crime tape, at the north edge of the crime scene. She leaned on a parked police squad SUV and banged her hand on the bumper of the car, sobbing.
Two other women hugged her and held her, trying to calm her down.
“Let me go,” she moaned. “Let me go. Let me go. I’m good.”
Despite protesting, she went limp in the women’s arms. Her wails would stop for a minute, then start again, then pause again and start again.
“What’s taking all day? Why are they just standing there? Why is he over there like that?” she exclaimed between sobs.
Another woman in a white tank top and red bandana sobbed several feet away. She held the metal bars of a railed fence with hands and leaned on it, crying.
“My brother. My brother. My brother,” she repeated.
A man in a gray hoodie came up to her from behind and hugged her.
As time passed by, more family members gathered at the crime scene.
A sergeant and Fredrick Irons, Blount’s father, sat down on the front steps of a two-flat red-brick home near the crime scene.
Irons rubbed his face and shook his head as the sergeant talked with him for a few minutes.
Blount, who grew up on the West Side, had a 12-year-old son and a 1-year-old daughter, his father said.
Irons said Blount, who was his only son, was an outgoing and hardworking person. He graduated from Collins Academy High School and worked for a contracting company that did work for the Chicago Housing Authority, his family said.
“He didn’t get into any trouble,” Irons said.
Family members also said Blount was not in a gang.
Neighbors said they heard at least three gunshots.
Calvin McMillan, 62, who lives in a three-story building in front of which Blount’s car was parked, said he woke up to gunshots outside his window. He said he knew Blount and his family and watched him grow up.
“He was a family man,” McMillan said. “He knew nothing about the thug life.”
McMillan said gunfire is not unusual in the neighborhood.
“It’s been crazy,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s us doing us… The hood ain’t the hood it was no more.”
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Irons said he last talked to his son Saturday morning when Blount called him to invite him to a party. Irons said he couldn’t go because of work, Blount and other family members were supposed to hang out during a barbecue on Sunday anyway.
Shevon Irons said her nephew Blount called her about 9:45 p.m. Saturday and invited her to hang out. She said he told her he was going to be out with his friends at Douglas Park.
“I told him, ‘I’ll just see you tomorrow,'” Shevon Irons said. “I told him to be careful.”
Around 3 a.m., police officers let a white van drive inside the crime scene. A pair of body removal workers picked up Blount’s body and rolled a gurney with his body into their van.
Blount’s sisters and other family members came up closer to the edge of the crime scene and started sobbing louder than before.
“I love you brother,” one woman screamed. “I love you. I love you.”
As the body removal van drove away, police officers started to take down the crime tape.
A team of about five detectives walked up to Irons and gave him the keys to Blount’s Audi.
Irons started weeping.
“He stayed out of trouble,” he told the detectives. “He listened to me.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” one of the detectives said. “We’ll do everything we can I can tell you that.”