Though it’s just down the street from their Marquette Park home, Annette Williams is glad she asked her son, who had recently returned home from his prom night, not to go to the store with the others.
“That was God,” Williams said. “That was God tellin’ me.”
If he’d gone with them, to the area of 72nd Street and South Western Avenue, he might have been shot, Williams said. Two other men were. One of them died.
Her son, who had just been celebrating his Gage Park High School prom, was now distraught at home, feeling like it could have been him who was shot, she said.
“And it could have,” Williams said.
Police said the two 25-year-old men were shot while standing in the street about 1:40 a.m. Saturday in the 7200 block of South Western Avenue. One man was shot multiple times in the torso and extremities and was pronounced dead at Advocate Christ Medical Center. The other man was shot in the left arm and back and was also taken to Christ, where police said his condition is serious but stable.
Williams said one of the men who was shot had just been at her house and is a family friend. The other was an employee at a Harold’s Chicken restaurant at the southwest corner of Western and 72nd, said a woman with a red apron who also works there.
“He’s my man,” she said, leaving for the hospital.
It was not immediately clear which man had been pronounced dead.
Red crime scene tape cut across the parking lot Harold’s Chicken shares with a Mobil gas station, leaving most of the gas pumps free but enclosing the restaurant inside the scene. The larger, yellow perimeter stretched around police cars parked along the western edge of the intersection, blocking off part of 72nd street
The two men were talking outside when people inside a dark sedan began shooting at them, hitting both multiple times, police said.
A girl who was with the group that went to the store rushed back to Williams’ house and banged on the door, yelling about the friend who was shot, Williams said. She ran to the scene. It took her about two minutes, and by the time she got there, paramedics had already arrived, she said.
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