Speeding away from the gunfire, the couple in the front seat of the minivan looked back and realized their friend was gone.
He’d been sitting in the back seat with the left passenger door slid open, they said. The driver had been out of the car, standing near the door talking to his friend about a job opportunity, when he noticed a man in the shadows, he told police.
The driver rushed back to his seat and “gunned it” as the shooter opened fire, his girlfriend said. He pushed her head down moments before a bullet shot through the van’s back window and hit the front windshield near where her head would have been. The bullet whizzed above her, she said.
“My guy saved me,” she said. “He saved my life.”
The other passenger, a 25-year-old man, was shot in the back after the shooter walked up to the minivan in the alley and started shooting about 12:05 a.m. Saturday in the 3700 block of North Troy Street, police said. The 25-year-old was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in serious condition.
The couple saw a police car blocks away and stopped, facing east on West Byron Street just west of its intersection with North Mozart Street. The gold van’s back window was shattered, the front windshield cracked where the bullet had hit, and the woman said another bullet was lodged in the back door below the window.
The driver’s brother, concerned about their safety, drove up in a red SUV and parked on Mozart. While an investigator took the driver aside for more questioning, the woman stood on the corner next to the brother, smoking a cigarette.
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“We almost died tonight,” she said. “… I’m sick to my stomach. Why did this happen to us?”
They’d picked up the friend from Christina’s Place, a neighborhood 4 a.m. bar at the southeast corner of Kedzie Avenue and Grace Street, and stopped briefly in the nearby alley, she said.
The driver had been showing his friend a local newspaper clipping advertising a driving job when he noticed the shooter, he told an officer on Byron Street. He grabbed a newspaper from the car and waved it in front of the officer.
The woman wondered aloud how their friend, who didn’t have his seat belt on, had gotten out of the van — Had he rolled out? Jumped out? — and hoped he was doing OK. They hadn’t heard from him yet, but police had told them he was at Masonic.
A man working security, checking IDs outside Christina’s Place, said he was also friends with the man who’d been shot and saw him walking toward him west on Grace, from the north end of the alley. The security guard met his friend down the block, learned he’d been shot and told him to sit down, he said. Then they waited together for the ambulance.
When the woman moved in about four years ago, the neighborhood was quieter, she said. Now she hears gunshots all the time and has noticed more gang graffiti, signs for the Maniac Latin Disciples and the Deuces. She’s also seen more feuding by young people riding bicycles.
It’s getting to the point where she doesn’t like to be outside at night, and is considering moving to the suburbs. The violence made them worried about publishing their names, she said.
In the alley where they’d been shot at, police found at least three shell casings. Two were marked next to each other in the middle of a small crime scene.
About an hour and a half after the shooting, a garage door opened on the east side of the alley. A man walked out and saw the yellow tape stretching in front of the garage.
An officer talked with the man, then walked over and conferred with a sergeant sitting in her car down the alley. He walked back to the scene, where another officer was standing guard. They talked about how the man could get out without running over a shell casing.
“It’s going to be very tight,” one officer said.
They held the tape up so the man could back the black Subaru out of the garage, then directed him how to turn and drive away so he didn’t mess up the evidence.