Romelo Reed last saw his younger sister across the street as he waited for a bus to their old neighborhood.
He yelled hi and said he would catch up with her. Minutes later, 17-year-old Sakinah Reed lay dying blocks away, shot twice in the chest by a gunman in a passing gray Ford Explorer about 3:30 p.m. Tuesday in the Grand Crossing neighborhood on the South Side.
Her childhood friend, 16-year-old Donta Parker, was standing beside her and was shot in the head. Both were pronounced dead an hour later at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn.
Another 16-year-old boy was shot in the hand and was taken in good condition to St. Bernard Hospital and Health Care Center, police said.
Parker, Sakinah Reed and the other 16-year-old were standing near the corner of 76th Street and Dorchester Avenue when they were shot, according to Officer Michelle Tannehill, a Chicago police spokeswoman.
Romelo Reed said someone from the Explorer asked whether they belonged to a gang and immediately opened fire. “They just rolled up … and just got to blowing,” he said. “Nobody had a chance to do nothing.”
Andrew Holmes, a community activist, said the teens were “ambushed.”
“These teenagers were walking from a store, and they were practically ambushed,” he said near the scene.
A law enforcement source said the shooting may be related to an earlier shooting a half-mile away and may be part of a gang conflict that has erupted in the neighborhood. No one was reported in custody.
Parker and the Reed siblings grew up in the same building at 88th Street and Burley Avenue and attended Thorp Elementary School down the block, according to Romelo Reed. They remained friends, and recent pictures of them together are on their Facebook pages.
Reed said his sister was an Los Angeles Clippers fan and loved to play basketball.
He said their mother was taking it hard. She gathered up all the photos of her daughter and left the family’s South Chicago home to stay with another relative, he said.
The family put up a white poster board on a black iron fence out front where people wrote short remembrances. A few candles and a white teddy bear were underneath it.
A friend of Reed’s said she knew of no reason why anyone would target her.
“She was a people person,” Deon Cavin told WGN-TV. “She wasn’t really into it with nobody. She didn’t have no enemies or any people after her or anything like that.”
The three teens were among at least 10 people shot across Chicago during a nearly 14-hour stretch Tuesday.
