A 19-year-old Merrillville woman airlifted from a Griffith shopping center parking lot Thursday evening has been released from a Chicago-area hospital, but police say the circumstances behind her shooting remain suspicious.
First responders were sent to the 2000 block of North Arbogast Avenue in the Park West Apartments around 6:40 p.m. May 28 to treat the young woman who’d been shot, Griffith Police Chief Greg Mance said. The woman was found leaning up against a vehicle and appeared to have wounds to her chest and left flank, Mance said.
First responders took the woman to the Griffith Plaza parking lot, where an air ambulance flew her to Advocate Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, Illinois, for treatment. Before she was taken, she told officers she’d been shot as she was leaving an apartment she and her boyfriend were visiting by an unknown person she couldn’t describe, Mance said in a subsequent release.
During a second interview at the hospital, however, the woman said she was shot on the couch inside the apartment she was visiting with her boyfriend, his family and friends, Mance said.
The woman’s boyfriend, as well as the people who live in the apartment were “extremely uncooperative throughout the investigation and were found to be deceptive in the limited statements they provided to officers and investigators,” Mance said.
The investigation is ongoing, and anyone with information is asked to contact Detective John Mowery at 219-924-7503, Ext. 256. Anonymous tips may be provided to police by calling 219-922-3085.
Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.
