Loud gunfire woke Erin Ross as she slept near her 1-year-old child in the early morning hours Saturday.
Ross said she found 39-year-old Dionus Neely and two of their children, Elle Neely,10, and Endia Neely, 3, limp inside the same living room inside their Hazel Crest home where they had all fallen asleep.
Family and friends of the Neely family pleaded through the media for anyone who knows about the shooting deaths to come forward to police.
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“Our family is messed up now because you all did not give a damn about what you were doing,” Ross said. “You just don’t have a heart, to take my family away from me.”
Hazel Crest police have not announced any arrests in the days following what Chief Mitchell Davis III said over the weekend was a “targeted act” by someone of “pure evil.”
Officers responded to a report of shots fired at about 2:20 a.m. Saturday and found the three people injured inside the home in the 2400 block of Crescent Drive, Hazel Crest police said. Police have released few other details about the incident and the investigation by the South Suburban Major Crimes Task Force.
Neely was a loving father who took care of his family, Ross told reporters Tuesday at a news conference outside the home.
“That’s all he wanted to do, was make sure we were good,” she said.
Ross said she didn’t know where the gunshots came from and didn’t see the shooters. At least three bullet holes are visible on the front, outside wall of their home.
According to court records, Neely’s criminal record includes convictions on drug charges for cases from 1998 and 2008, receiving four years in prison for the latter charge. A judge found him not guilty in a 2014 drug case.
Activists and Neely’s family members on Tuesday asked the community to look beyond his past and, instead, help catch those responsible.
“This is what matters, these kids’ lives matter,” said Chicago activist Andrew Holmes. “Everybody is looking and seeing these, but when it comes down to who took the lives of somebody, nobody sees nothing.”
“When these gunshots went off, what did you see, what did you hear and what do you know?” Holmes continued.
Holmes said that this wasn’t a random attack, “this was torture.”
Martina Patterson, Elle and Endia’s aunt, said her two nieces meant the world to her. The two girls would come running up to her car after she pulled into the Crescent Drive home’s driveway, she said.
They were loving children, Patterson said. She called Endia her “mini me” because the child look just like her.
“We’re all hurting, but we just want justice at the end of the day,” she said.
Nick Swedberg is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.