Dale Fisher was walking to a friend’s house after an afternoon of video games and YouTube videos when a gunman leaned outside a two-door silver vehicle and fired, striking the 16-year-old in the chest, friends and authorities said.
Fisher was shot about 4 p.m. Saturday in the 6200 block of South St. Lawrence Avenue in the city’s West Woodlawn neighborhood, a Cook County medical examiner’s office spokesman said, adding that he was pronounced dead at Stroger Hospital.
On Sunday, his family gathered at their Chatham neighborhood home to mourn the baby of the family of four.
“He was just hanging out with the wrong crowd, I guess,” said Fisher’s mother, Romana. “He was a good boy. He was involved in a life he didn’t understand.”
The Fisher family insists Dale wasn’t involved in a gang, but they said kids in West Woodlawn where he spent most of his time fight and have territorial beefs with each other.
“It’s just the young guy territory,” a neighbor who did not want to be identified said, looking toward the intersection where Dale was gunned down. “It don’t make no sense.”
Police could not say Sunday whether the shooting was gang-related, citing an ongoing investigation, said Officer Darryl Baety, a Chicago Police Department spokesman.
The 16-year-old, nicknamed “Squirrel,” went to a local recreational center in West Woodlawn almost daily, family members said.
It was no different Saturday. Dale Fisher and a friend were walking back from the center where the boys played video games and watched YouTube videos of local rappers, said his sister Kenyada, 24.
A block from where the boys had been, a car pulled up, and a gunman fired several shots, neighbors and authorities said. Two of the shots struck the boy in the chest, police said. The vehicle that carried the gunman fled.
No one was in custody Sunday evening, police said.
Fisher, of the of the 7700 block of South Langley Avenue, hung around in West Woodlawn because that’s where he grew up and where most of his friends were, his family said.
Fisher, who was a student at Hyde Park Academy High School, loved to tinker with cars and bicycles.
“He could take a whole bicycle apart and put it back together,” Kenyada Fisher said.
At a memorial set up Sunday afternoon, a lone bicycle wheel had been laid against a stop sign. Messages such as “God rest his soul” were left by friends and neighbors.
“My son just wanted to play games, eat up (all) the food inside the house and tinker,” Dale’s mother said.
