13 People Wounded in Park Shooting in Chicago

20 Sep, 2013

Chicago police are searching for suspected gang members who opened fire with an assault weapon at a park late on Thursday, wounding 13 people including a 3-year-old boy, in an attack that highlighted Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s struggle to stem street crime.

Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy told a news conference that up to three gunmen used at least one assault-style weapon with a high-capacity ammunition clip to fire on a crowd in the city’s Back of the Yards neighborhood.

The shooting, on a warm night when residents were enjoying a basketball game, came 10 days after Emanuel and McCarthy held a press conference in a nearby neighborhood to claim success in a strategy of flooding 20 high-crime neighborhoods with police.

“A military-grade weapon on the streets of Chicago is simply unacceptable,” McCarthy said. “This kind of shocks the consciousness just like the other high-profile incidents that happen across this country.”

Emanuel’s office said he canceled meetings in Washington on Friday and returned to Chicago, where he went to a hospital to visit Deonta Howard, the 3-year-old boy police said was critically wounded by a bullet entering his ear.

“Senseless and brazen acts of violence have no place in Chicago and betray all that we stand for,” Emanuel said in a statement. “The perpetrators of this crime will be brought to justice and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Reuters

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