The first call was for a well-being check Thursday afternoon at an apartment building complex in the South Shore neighborhood. Inside a third-floor unit, a 26-year-old pregnant woman was found dead with a gunshot wound to her head.
Hours later and about four blocks away, a gunman walked up to a popular chicken and fish restaurant on a busy stretch of South Coles Avenue and opened fire, killing two young brothers who were there visiting their mother and other men who happened to be inside.
Before the day was done, a man and a woman were slain by someone who pulled up to their car in a black Jeep in front of the South Shore Cultural Center and fired multiple shots.
In just under 12 hours, seven people were killed by gun violence in South Shore, a grisly toll for a historic African-American enclave that’s home to many middle-class families but also entrenched street gangs that for years have waged a bloody turf war.
The spate of shootings came just as Chicago police were touting a drop in homicides in the first quarter of 2017.
More Top Picks Best Standing Desk Converters For Home
As gossip spread on the street about who was targeted and whether the violence was interconnected, some longtime South Shore residents expressed shock at the violence while others said it was nothing new.
“It was pretty shocking that four people would get killed at once,” said a barber at the Black Wall Street barbershop and salon on East 75th Street. “But somebody getting shot? That ain’t s—.”
Police sources have said the quadruple slaying may have been retaliation for the gang-related slaying Wednesday night of a 37-year-old man in the 7900 block of South Phillips Avenue, in a pocket so notoriously violent that many refer to it as “Terror Town.”
In a news conference Friday afternoon down the street from the scene of the quadruple homicide, police Superintendent Eddie Johnson told reporters he was “angry and sickened” by the violence but offered few specifics of the investigations, other than to say the shootings were “targeted and are related to gang conflicts in the area.”
“And while that doesn’t lessen the weight of what happened, we know that these weren’t random acts of violence,” said Johnson, flanked by other command staff.
He promised a heightened police presence in the area over the weekend, saying that police saturation teams — roving patrols that respond to areas seeing spikes in violence — and other units will be in spots where they believe retaliatory shootings may occur.
Johnson said some of the people involved in the shootings had gang affiliations but did not elaborate. The killing of the pregnant woman, Patrice Calvin, was not related to the two other shootings, he said.
“You will see a heavy police presence until we bring these individuals, get them in custody and hold them accountable for what they did,” he said.
The South Shore neighborhood has long been one of Chicago’s most prominent African-American communities and still boasts a solid contingent of middle-class families, from bungalow-lined streets to high-rise apartment buildings dotting the lakefront.
It’s the birthplace of former first lady Michelle Obama, who grew up in a middle-class home and attended Bryn Mawr School, now Bouchet school at 73rd Street and South Jeffrey Avenue. In 1992, she and future President Barack Obama had their wedding reception at the South Shore Cultural Center, an icon of the community that hosts jazz festivals, art exhibitions and private events.
But pockets of the neighborhood have been long beset by violence, much of it stemming from street gangs such as the Black P. Stones and Gangster Disciples. One of the areas notorious to law enforcement is Terror Town, a two-block by four-block patch where gang conflicts have erupted into several recent mass shootings, often quickly followed by retaliation.
But the seven slayings on Thursday took place blocks away from Terror Town. Standing near Nadia Fish and Chicken restaurant at 75th Street and South Coles Avenue, where the four victims were slain, longtime resident Natasha Dunn said Friday she was horrified by the news of the bloodshed in her neighborhood of 42 years.
“For the most part, I feel safe in South Shore, but this startled everyone,” she said Friday as a light drizzle fell. “We have good areas and we have, unfortunately, areas like this. You can walk five blocks west of here and you can find nice homes and things of that nature. And then you come here and clearly see there’s some obvious decline.”
Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Friday condemned what he termed the “evil and depravity” of people who would shoot a pregnant woman or kill a woman’s sons in front of her.
“For the people that did what they did yesterday…there’s only one place for them,” the mayor said in a statement to reporters after the groundbreaking for a West Loop building. “They do not belong in our society, they do not belong in our city and they do not belong on the streets. They belong behind bars.”
Police said the quadruple homicide happened around 3:50 p.m. Thursday when a gunman walked up to Nadia restaurant and opened fire.
One woman who lives a short distance from the restaurant said she was talking to one of the victims — a neighborhood man who sells loose cigarettes — when the gunman shot him just inches from her.
“I seen it all, I was right there when the guns went off,” said the woman, who didn’t want to be identified. “All of a sudden, he came out that side door and shot that boy. The boy stood up and he shot him again.”
Dillon Jackson, 20, was found dead outside the restaurant. His brother, Raheem Jackson, 19, was found slumped against a tree down the block. Emmanuel Stokes, 28, and Edwin Davis, 32, were both found dead inside the restaurant.
The Jacksons’ grandmother, Georgia Jackson, 72, said at the scene Thursday that her two grandsons had gone to the restaurant to get food and see their mother, who worked there.
They weren’t the first grandsons Jackson has lost to gunfire. In 2012, her then-16-year-old grandson Jawan Ross, who was a cousin of the two slain Thursday, was fatally shot inside a Church’s Chicken store by a gunman who had chased someone inside after a quarrel, she said.
“I didn’t have kids to lose ’em like this,” the distraught grandmother said.
About seven hours after the quadruple slayings, a couple were in a silver van outside the Cultural Center on 71st Street near South Shore Drive when a black Jeep pulled alongside and someone inside fired shots, police said. The van accelerated and slammed into a pole just north of the Metra tracks. Police found a 27-year-old man in the back seat with a gunshot wound to the side of his body, and a 23-year-old woman in the front passenger seat with a gunshot wound to the head. A third man in the car was uninjured.
Both victims, 23-year-old Dominique Victoria Scott, of the Gary, Ind., and 27-year-old Cornell M. Patrick, of the 10000 block of South Crandon Avenue, were pronounced dead at the scene, according to the medical examiner’s office.
Police believe the shooters were targeting one or more of the people in the van.
baiduhai’s Megan Crepeau and Elyssa Cherney contributed.
More Top Picks Best Pergolas For Backyard
Editor’s note: This story was updated on April 3, 2017, when the medical examiner’s office released the identities of Patrick and Scott.