CHICAGO (WBBM) – Police Thursday canvassed the South Chicago neighborhood where a 7-year-old girl as critically wounded, hoping to find clues and information that can lead them to the gunman.
Detectives and community policing volunteers left business cards and information on ways to report tips. Ald. Sandi Jackson (7) said that block clubs and active community policing workshops are the only ways to curb the violence in the area.
Claudius Johnson has lived on the 8000 block of South Manistee Avenue for 35 years, and said the area more recently has had its good days and bad days, but said he’s seen a pattern.
“I think we should have this every day,” Johnson said of the saturation police patrol in the area. “It seems like the police and the gunfire never come together at the same time. When you call the police, they’re too late to get here…when they get here everything is all quiet again.”
Dorothy Washington organized girls in the neighborhood to write victim Desaree Sanders and her parents expressing their prayers and good wishes. But she said she is too scared to let her own six children, ages 8 through 18, to play outside.
“It’s sad,” she said. “This is our neighborhood and our kids can’t even be safe in our own neighborhood.”
One teen said she’s hoping Desaree has a miraculous full recovery, and said it makes no sense to shoot up the neighborhood “over nothing.”
Two people police questioned shortly after the shooting were released from custody Wednesday night.
Desaree was riding her scooter on the sidewalk and hoped to visit with her grandmother. Instead, she was shot in the forehead and doctors at the University of Chicago Comer’s Children’s Hospital said that she may lose the sight in one of her eyes. Doctors also are keeping a close eye on pressure in her brain after being shot in the head.
“The doctors said the bullet didn’t touch her brain,” the girl’s grandfather, Nelson Edwards, told the Chicago Tribune. “We’re praying that’s what happened.”
Bob Roberts reporting
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