Chicago was plagued by bloodshed during the long Fourth of July holiday weekend, when 109 people were shot and 19 were killed, authorities said.
There were 74 shooting incidents in the city from Wednesday to Sunday — including three mass shootings — according to data released by police.
The youngest victim was 8-year-old Bryson Orr, who was killed along with two female relatives in a shooting at a home in the Grand Crossing neighborhood the morning of July 4. Two other boys, ages 5 and 7, were injured, NBC Chicago reported.
On Friday, eight people were shot in a mass shooting in the Little Italy neighborhood, including teenagers and a 74-year-old woman. Police said preliminary information indicates two unidentified people exchanged gunfire and fled.
Last year, 11 people were killed and 62 were injured over the holiday weekend, according to the NBC Chicago.
Mayor Brandon Johnson condemned the violence at a news conference Monday, saying: “When this reckless violence ravages across our city at this magnitude, we are losing a piece of the soul of Chicago.”
The onslaught of bullets isn't unique to the city. Violence and mass shootings tend to surge in the summer, and the Fourth of July has historically had the most mass shootings over the past decade, followed by July 5, data from the Gun Violence Archive shows, according to The Associated Press.
Johnson asked for more federal resources to support communities reeling from the carnage. He also called upon community members to look out for one another and to come forward with perpetrators’ names.
“Our city needs each and every one of us to lean and look out for our neighbors, to look out for our children,” he said.
“Let me be emphatically clear: This is a choice. It’s a choice to kill. The choice to kill women. A choice to kill children, a choice to kill the elderly. These are choices that the offenders made and they calculated.”
Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling noted the challenges of police work during the holiday weekend.
“We look at celebratory days of the year, the Fourth of July and other days like it, where groups come together, large groups gather. And sometimes this violence comes out of petty arguments. People who have been together all day, they come together as a group, they’ve been drinking, tempers flare and people decide that they are going to air out their differences through violence, especially gun violence,” he said.
An emergency assistance center will be set up Tuesday at Fosco Park, where community organizations will provide support resources to people in distress, including crisis counseling.
Johnson said the violence did not happen “in a vacuum.” Instead, he said, it is the result of generations of disinvestment and deep disenfranchisement.
He also stressed that Chicago’s streets are filled with illegal guns that need to be cleared out.
“We also need to double down on our efforts to get guns off our streets. When a 16-year-old has access to an AK-47, the violence began well before that weapon reached the hands of young people across the city and across this country,” he said.
According to Chicago police crime statistics, during the week ending June 30, shooting incidents were down 7% compared to the same week last year. Furthermore, shootings were down 27% year to date compared to 2021. However, over the 28 days before June 30, shooting incidents had risen 12% compared to the same period last year.