1-year-old boy shot to the head in Chicago as city nears 700 homicides in 2021.
A 1-year-old boy survived a gunshot wound to the head in Chicago on Thursday as the Windy City nears a grim milestone for homicides in 2021.
Talisha Ashford was driving down the South Side of Chicago with her three children when a shooting broke out near her vehicle.
A bullet passed through the windshield of the truck, past Ashford, and grazed the head of his 1-year-old son, Cor’Mari Allen.
“A bullet went past me and my baby was in the back,” Ashford told to media. “It made a popping noise in my ear. I could feel it so close to me that I actually thought I had been hit.”
Allen’s older brother, Cordaryl Allen, 10, recalled yelling “they beat him” once he noticed that his little brother was bleeding.
“At first I thought they shot him right here because I saw a lot of blood,” Cordaryl recalls. “There was a lot of blood.”
Surveillance footage obtained from the scene at a gas station shows four men exiting a vehicle and approaching another man at 75th and State Street. All four fired at the man, who returned fire despite being hit.
The attacked man and one of the four men were injured. Until Friday, their conditions were not known.
Chicago police detained a person of interest in the case and are currently questioning her about the shooting. His name has not been released to the public, but the department said there are charges pending against him.
OkeyNews contacted the Chicago Police Department for comment on this story.
Ashford explained that she was so shocked by the incident, that once it happened, she got out of her truck to help her young son before even parking it. At first, she was so concerned about her son’s injury that she was afraid to even touch him.
“These are innocent kids and they deserve a chance,” Ashford said. “This is a 1-year-old boy. He doesn’t know anything.”
Allen will need surgery to remove the bullet fragments from his head wound.
As of Friday, Chicago is on the cusp of 700 homicide deaths in all of 2021. With the murder of Chinese college student Shaoxiong “Dennis” Zheng on Tuesday, the tally for Friday was 698, surpassing the 680 homicides during the same period in 2020.
As with most major US cities, the rate of violence of this type in Chicago soared amid the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, in 2019, the Second City had seen 442 homicides.