A CTA bus shooting that killed a Julian High School student and wounded four others resulted from a long-festering feud between two members of the same street gang, law-enforcement sources said Sunday.
The sources revealed details about the slaying of Blair Holt, 16 — described as an innocent victim who died saving a friend’s life — shortly after the arrests of two Chicago teenagers in Thursday’s shooting.
Michael Pace, 16, who is alleged to have fired the shots on the bus, and Kevin Jones, 15, who is alleged to have given Pace the .40-caliber semiautomatic weapon he used, were each charged as adults with one count of murder and five counts of attempted murder.
One of the counts of attempted murder relates to the uninjured target, said Tandra Simonton, a spokeswoman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.
Pace and his intended target, who was in the back seat of the bus but was not shot, feuded for years before the shooting, which police believe was not related to gang activity, the sources said.
The feud started with a disagreement over a girl, one source said.
“I think they have forgotten why it started,” the source said. “It’s just bad blood.”
None of the victims was a gang member, the sources said. “They were just innocent bystanders,” one source said.
As police were first announcing the arrests, Holt’s father Ronald, a Chicago police officer, recalled how he and his son decided on a special Mother’s Day gift for Annette Nance-Holt, a Chicago firefighter who recently won a promotion to captain.
They planned to buy a medallion in the form of Nance-Holt’s firefighter’s badge, and Ronald Holt was in a novelty store making that plan reality Thursday afternoon when his wife called him.
“She told me what happened, and I just couldn’t believe it at first, but I knew it wasn’t a joke,” Ronald Holt told the congregation Sunday at Sweet Holy Spirit Church on the South Side.
Ronald Holt, like the sources, said that Jones provided the gun and that Pace did the shooting. Pace had been expelled from Julian High School, which Blair Holt attended, and placed in an alternative school, Ronald Holt said. “Blair did not know that individual,” he added.
Surveillance cameras on the bus and at a nearby currency exchange captured images of the crime, and witnesses picked Pace and Jones out of police lineups, sources said.
Of the other four injured students, one girl is still in the hospital and is expected to survive.
Witnesses said Blair Holt sustained his fatal wound to the abdomen while protecting friend Tiara Reed, whom he pushed back down into her seat as bullets flew. She sustained a wound to her foot.
Ronald Holt, a gang unit officer, said he would lobby in his son’s name for further state gun restrictions. The goal of what could be called Blair’s Law, he said, would “be to try to find some way to make it more difficult for these guns to end up in the hands of the wrong people.”
Violent trend
Blair Holt was the 20th Chicago Public Schools student to die this year from guns, according to schools chief Arne Duncan.
