Chrissy Sanders, 32, had just finished taking her 6-year-old son trick-or-treating on Halloween night and arrived at the vigil for a friend in East Garfield Park a little late, around 8:30 p.m.
As Sanders began to pay respects with friends and loved ones of the woman who died, Sanders’ female cousin told her, “I’m taking the kids to the car,” and took Sanders’ 6-year-old and her two small children to their car parked nearby on California Avenue.
“I’m so glad” she scooped them up and away from the scene, Sanders said of her cousin.
Sanders stood between two cars, talking about funeral arrangements, and then began to cross the street. She heard assailants “let off 20 to 30 rounds” and somebody scream, “Get down!”
“I ducked in between the trucks,” Sanders said.
She didn’t see the car the assailants were in but heard people around her yelling: “I’m shot, I’m shot … I’m down … I’m hit!”
Her adrenaline rushing, Sanders didn’t realize she was shot or even feel it. “I took off running,” she said.
A relative picked her up and drove her to the hospital. That’s when she noticed “a hole” in her leg.
Once at Mount Sinai Hospital, multiple other victims streamed into the emergency room and her son began crying, “Oh, I hope my momma doesn’t die!”
Looking back on it, Sanders, who was recovering at her West Side home on Wednesday afternoon, a bullet still lodged in her thigh, said the situation is “sickening.”
“People don’t have any compassion,” Sanders said of the shooters, who she believed knew children were on the scene.
Her 6-year-old, who said he never wants to celebrate Halloween again, told Sanders: “God spared you.”
At least 14 people were shot, including a 3-year-old and two other minors, in the drive-by shooting Monday night during the East Garfield Park vigil on the West Side, police said. Another woman trying to flee the scene was struck by a vehicle as she was crossing a street.
The group had been standing on the corner of South California and West Polk Street for the vigil at about 9:20 p.m. when two people from inside a dark SUV began shooting, police said. The vehicle fled south.
An 18-year-old woman, who asked to remain anonymous out of safety concerns, said she was at the vigil and balloon release for a relative and was mostly surrounded by family that night.
Suddenly, shots went off, she said. She turned away from where the shots were being fired from, so she didn’t see a car or anyone, she said.
“I just heard the shots, and I ran a little bit. I felt a bullet go past my back, a little sting,” she said. “Kept hearing gunshots, people screaming … Just screaming. I heard my mom screaming … My mind went like blank.”
The woman got under a car before she was able to run to her nearby house, she said. A lot of her family lives in the area and she said the violence is “not always like this.”
Once the shots were over, she ran back across the street and called police and a cousin, telling them that people got shot.
The woman found her mother, who was shot in the leg, but her mom didn’t know or feel that she was injured until a cousin pointed it out, she said.
The police began to arrive and started attending to the victims. The woman said most of those who were shot were members of her family.
Her mom, an aunt and the children, who are her cousins, were shot. Two have since left the hospital but one was still there as of Wednesday, she said. They don’t know who the shooters were or why they targeted the family vigil, she said: “Maybe wrong place, wrong time.”
“Everyone is trying to recover,” she said. “Honestly, I’m mind-blown that this happened. I’m mind-blown that it happened to my family, whatever the case may be. I never in my life thought we would be in a situation like that. I do hope that who did do it gets caught and goes to jail, but anything else, I don’t have nothing to say.”
Earlier Wednesday, a small crowd gathered at the same spot where the shooting occurred.
The crowd of about 60 people was a mix of elected officials, representatives of nonprofits like Breakthrough Urban Ministries and Institute for Nonviolence Chicago, and other community leaders. They had come to the corner of South California and West Polk Street to let people know violence is not tolerated in the neighborhood, or anywhere else.
A few Chicago police squad cars were also parked at the intersection, and officers watched the news conference from the street. The event started with a group prayer.
Yolanda Fields is the executive director of Breakthrough, a community-based organization that provides violence prevention and intervention services in East Garfield Park. The nonprofit responded to the scene after the shooting.
Fields said the shooting was “not normal” for the neighborhood and there have been “boots on the ground” every hour of every day since, but she called on more people to take an active role in solutions that the community is working on to protect against violence instead of only mourning along after something happens.
“It is not business as usual, and we refuse to behave as such,” Fields said. “We’re not washing, we’re not rinsing and we’re not repeating.”
Fields said that 10 of the shooting victims are part of one family and it was a relative of that family who had passed away for whom the vigil was planned. She said two of the children injured are siblings.
“I know the mom is concerned about her children right now,” Fields said. “The youngest one was going into surgery yesterday, and so their immediate thoughts are about being well, and that’s been the extent of our conversations.”
Some of the family members had already been released from the hospital, Fields said, while one was still in critical condition and two others were in serious condition.
Chicago’s Deputy Mayor of Public Safety Elena Gottreich said at the news conference the investigation into the shooting is still ongoing, and more details will be released as the Police Department sees fit.
On Wednesday evening, Mayor Lori Lightfoot, five aldermen, and other elected officials such as state Rep. Lakesia Collins and U.S. Rep. Danny Davis joined clergy for an emotional prayer vigil at the street corner where the shooting occurred. More than a hundred community members showed up.
“We cannot allow these despicable, cowardly acts to be normalized or accepted in any way. Are you with me on this?” asked Lightfoot, to various cheers and applause from the crowd. She then called for a statewide ban on assault weapons.
To begin in a tangible way, Lightfoot said, the people responsible for the shooting have to turn themselves in so the victims can begin to heal. And the city, she said, must address young people’s addiction to guns.
“What we must do is make sure that our young people know — they are not safer when they pick up a gun. They are not,” Lightfoot said. “It’s like holding a grenade in your hand and pulling the pin. The question is not ‘if’ the tragedy is going to happen. The question is ‘when.'”
Police Superintendent David Brown was also present. After Lightfoot addressed the shooters, Brown also took some time to send a message.
“You can run but you cannot hide from the Chicago Police Department,” he said. He then addressed the Garfield Park community. “So goes the West Side, so goes Chicago. So you are a strong community. Hold your head high,” Brown said. “Because we need you to stay strong. Stay committed to your young people. Stay committed to your families.”
Faith remained the main focus of the vigil, as clergy shared thoughts and led prayers for attendees. Many speakers asked for federal, state and local resources to be poured into the West Side community just as Highland Park saw after the July 4 mass shooting.
Rep. Collins, a mother of three, said she lives in fear of getting a phone call that one of her children was hit by a stray bullet or killed by gun violence in the city. “No mother should have to face that,” she said.
To close out the vigil, Ald. Jason Ervin, 28th, who represents the East Garfield Park community, reminded everyone, “Faith without works is dead. Today we pray — tomorrow we work.”
Cornelius Parks, senior pastor at Good Hope Freewill Baptist Church in the neighborhood, said he and several others have been “serving this community for 52 years” but they can’t do it alone.
“We need men and women to take accountability of your own community,” Parks said. “There’s only so much CPD can do. There’s only so much that outsiders can do. If you don’t take a stand in your own community, that could be your son, that could be your daughter.”
He said there was a time when he was growing up and was able to walk to school and when the neighborhood was a true community, but said something happened to that feeling and now children’s lives “are in jeopardy.”
The community needs to “get to the table” and band back together, he said, to show the neighborhood’s strength and what is needed to make improvements.
Collins, a Chicago Democrat, saw a comparison to the mass shooting at the Highland Park July 4 parade, and said the Black community, whether on the West or South Side, wants to see the same level of response as Highland Park did.
“We want the same ugency in our community, the same attention, and we don’t need any more allies,” Collins said. “We need co-conspirators, people who are intentional about uplifting the Black community, because we have been ignored for so long, and we are tired of the same old cries and narratives.”
Kathleen Sances, president and CEO of the Gun Violence Prevention Political Action Committee, or G-PAC, said in a statement Wednesday the organization is committed to making sure the momentum to ban guns is channeled into “meaningful policy change” and thanked Lightfoot for joining the statewide call for gun violence prevention.
Illinois has seen 48 mass shootings since the beginning of the year, 37 of which were in Chicago, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Mass shootings make up only a fraction of fatal shootings across the state, according to the statement from G-PAC.
