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8-year-old girl killed, 3 adults injured when someone shoots into car on South Side

Three firefighters knelt next to the 8-year-old girl where she lay on Union Avenue with a gunshot wound to the back, checking her injuries and measuring signs of life while a chaotic scene spread around them.

Every few seconds, more people arrived: more cops, more paramedics, more neighbors, more people stopping their cars on 47th Street to see what this commotion was about.

But in the minutes before the first ambulance arrived, before police tied tape to light poles and fences, everyone focused on those trying to save the girl, fighting what would be a losing battle.

The girl did not move. Her eyes were closed. She wore black flip-flops.

An officer stood nearby with his back to the girl, checking on her and those trying to save her but also watching for the ambulance.

When the first ambulance arrived, a sergeant yelled to officers in a beat car parked on 47th Street.

“Follow the ambo, give it a lead wherever it’s going,” he said.

Other officers walked out onto 47th Street and stopped traffic.

Paramedics rushed the yellow stretcher to the girl. Her short braids moved as the paramedics lifted her onto the stretcher. They rushed her back to the ambulance. A paramedic had cut her shirt open and was doing CPR. Those who had been standing near her jogged along with the stretcher, even if not working.

One woman standing, watching, repeated the same profanity over and over. Another cried.

“They’re going to Comer’s,” a Fire Department chief said to a paramedic. “Follow the beat car.”

Three other ambulances arrived, and the first departed with a Police Department escort. Three adults were in the car, and a 31-year-old man who likely was the target was shot but expected to survive. A woman, 30, was shot and the girl’s mother, 30, was injured, possibly by broken glass, when the car crashed.

“I stand before you, saddened and angered that another child has lost their life in senseless gun violence in the city of Chicago,” Brian McDermott, chief of operations for the Police Department, told reporters at the scene Monday night.

Before the shooting, the car that the girl was in was stopped at a red light at 47th Street facing north, with another vehicle, a black Dodge Charger, behind it, McDermott said. When the light turned green, someone in the Charger opened fire, he said.

The car the girl was in kept going north and crashed into a tree, and the Charger turned around and headed south on Union, McDermott said.

At Comer Children’s Hospital, a group of women came outside before 8:30 p.m., crying. Two helped hold up one as they walked to a car.

One man slammed the doors of the hospital while crying out. He ran down the street, then ran back and shook a pole while talking on the phone.

By the time the girl had been shot, Labor Day weekend had seen at least 44 people shot, six of them fatally. So far this year, at least 175 children ages 16 or younger have been shot in Chicago, with at least 21 of them dying, according to Tribune data. Of those, at least 45 children age 13 or younger have been shot, five of them fatally. In total, more than 2,850 people have been shot in the city this year, at least 464 of them fatally.

Chicago Tribune’s Michael Hawthorne contributed.