Nequan McCree stood shirtless on a South Loop sidewalk early Thursday, his arms around two weeping cousins.
Two of their relatives were on the street in front of them, bleeding from gunshot wounds.
Minutes earlier, around 2 a.m. Thursday, the five of them were in a car on Lake Shore Drive when they noticed a white Chevrolet Malibu following them near Michigan Avenue, where the drive curves to the east.
“They were swerving into every lane we got into,” McCree said.
The Malibu followed the red Nissan to Lower Wacker Drive, where someone in the Malibu rolled down a window and started shooting, he said. The Nissan exited at Harrison Street. The Malibu kept following. Then the shooting started again.
McCree’s brother finally pulled over at Jefferson Street as the Malibu sped away. He had been hit in the buttocks and his sister in the backseat was shot in the head.
A group of squad cars and Ambulance 28 pulled up to the Nissan, which sat in the middle of the intersection with its doors hanging open and a bullet hole in the windshield. McCree’s sister, 23, slowly walked up to the ambulance, holding a wad of white cloth to the side of her head. She got inside, lay on her back and stayed completely still.
Her brother, 24, was on the ground a few feet away, leaning on his right side so paramedics could see the wound near his left hip. An emergency worker knelt down with a small pair of scissors to cut away the blood-soaked cloth and patched the wound with gauze and tape. He was lifted onto a stretcher and put inside Ambulance 41.
Both were taken to Stroger Hospital, the man in good condition, the woman in serious, police said.
‘They chased us on the expressway, Ma. They shot (them), Ma’
McCree, 20, stood on a sidewalk, yelling into a phone. The pavement next to him was spotted with blood.
“They chased us on the expressway, Ma,” he said, almost crying. “They shot (them), Ma.”
His cousins, one wearing red and one in blue, stood next to him screaming.
“I’m not giving my name,” the woman in a blue jacket told a police officer. “I’m not trying to get killed.”
She smoked a cigarette and tried to explain what happened.
“We didn’t do nothing wrong,” she said. “We go to work. … I’ve never thought that this s— would happen to me. What is wrong with these people?”
The woman in red sat in the middle of the sidewalk, sobbing uncontrollably.
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“(She) got shot in the head right in front of me,” she cried into a cellphone. “I have her blood on my hands!”
‘If you care about her, then you’ll talk to the detectives’
A gray car pulled up to the north side of the crime scene. The two women who were inside the Nissan got into the back seats.
A police sergeant and a handful of officers walked up. The women were witnesses, they explained. They couldn’t leave yet.
“I gotta go to the hospital,” the woman in the red jacket said. “We gotta go.”
“Wait, wait, wait,” a sergeant said. “You can’t leave.”
They still had to give statements to the detectives, he said.
The woman in the red jacket stepped out of the car.
“Do you care about her?” he asked her. “If you care about her, then you’ll talk to the detectives.”
“What do you mean I don’t care about her?” she screamed. “What the f— do you mean?”
She opened the car door and pushed it forward into the sergeant, shoving him back.
“OK, go.” The sergeant stepped away, and the car drove west.
‘This city is like no other. … Everything fell apart’
McCree stayed behind at the crime scene.
“This city is like no other,” he said as he stood at Jefferson and Harrison. “It’s not the people. It is the structure behind the people. People don’t have no structure. Everything fell apart.”
A man pulled up in a white SUV and called out to McCree: “Where’s the strip club?”
“Well, I don’t know no strip club,” McCree yelled. “Get the f— away from me!”
The man in the SUV lingered. McCree stared him down.
“My brother and my sister just got shot,” McCree said. “Get the f— away from me, boy.”
The SUV drove off the wrong way on Jefferson.
McCree shook his head.
He knew people would assume the shooting was gang-related, but they were wrong, he said.
“I’ll be real, I haven’t gangbanged since 2012,” he said. “That’s some 16-year-old s—. That’s some four-years-ago s—.”
The shooting wasn’t his family’s first brush with violence. One of his cousins was shot to death last month on the West Side. Another cousin was gunned down in a South Shore gas station in 2013, he said.
“I just laugh to keep from crying every day,” McCree said.
