Michael Williams searched through his backyard garbage can, tilting his flip phone for light. No gun.
But he had to check. Williams, a security guard by trade, figured whoever opened fire in the alley two houses away may have tossed the gun into his trash.
“That weapon is gone,” a police officer told Williams.
“Just wanna make sure it wasn’t in my garbage can,” he replied.
Late Wednesday, someone opened fire into a group of people behind a one-story house with a white metal fence in the 300 block of West 106th Street in the Fernwood neighborhood on the Far South Side.
A 25-year-old man was pronounced dead on the scene. A second man, 43, was shot in the neck and critically wounded.
Relatives said the 43-year-old had been hanging out with a few others in back of the house when the shots rang out. The back door was locked, so he and his friends ran around the side of the building, pounding on windows.
He ran up the steps to the front door and his brother-in-law Sammie Peters let him in. “The blood was gushing from his neck,” said Peters, 30. “There was so much blood.”
Peters was inside the home with his 9-year-old daughter when the gunfire erupted. He would have been outside, in the range of the bullets, if his daughter hadn’t made him stay inside to help her with a Barbie computer game.
When he heard the shots — a dozen or more — he ran to the back of the home, trying the back door, then rushed to the front and opened the door to his bleeding brother-in-law. He stumbled inside and collapsed in front of Peters’ daughter. She screamed hysterically.
Family members put pressure on his wound and waited for the ambulance, which took him to the Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn. “He lost so much blood that I didn’t think he would make it,” Peters said.
As of early Thursday, the man was breathing on his own and talking, Peters said.
His wife was with him at the hospital. Two years ago, she was wounded in a shooting in front of the same house, hit in the arm and side, relatives said. Thursday is the couple’s wedding anniversary, Peters said.
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“If it’s not one thing, it’s another,” said Willie Nelson, another relative of the 43-year-old man. “It’s crazy.”
Family members said the 43-year-old man — whom they did not want identified — works as a mechanic and is not part of a gang. “I don’t know what the hell happened,” Peters said.
Relatives of the 25-year-old man arrived at the scene as word spread.
A woman in a pink T-shirt and jean shorts ran up and turned to another woman standing near the police tape.
“Did somebody get shot over here?” she asked.
“Uh-huh,” the other woman replied.
“Was it Reese? He’s not dead, is he?”
“Yes.”
The woman in pink broke down in sobs and walked away to lean on a metal fence.
Relatives and friends of the man who was killed went to join her, then walked around the block to the backyard of a home on 105th Place.
The alley was dark except for the blue police lights and detectives’ flashlights. A police SUV on the east side of the crime scene blocked the body from view.
Michael Williams stood in his fenced backyard, across the alley from the quiet group in the backyard. He heard another group of mourners on 105th Place, screaming and fighting.
Williams put his hands on his waist and shook his head.
“This is an emotional time,” Williams said. “I pray for them.”