7 dead in 3 separate shootings in South Shore neighborhood

SUN-TIMES MEDIA WIRE - Seven people, including a pregnant woman, were killed in three separate shootings that happened within 12 hours of each other on Thursday in South Shore.

The attacks took place in an eight-block radius in the neighborhood, but Chicago Police have not said if they were related. No arrests had been made as of Friday morning.

The latest homicides happened about 11 p.m. as a 27-year-old man and a 23-year-old woman rode as passengers in a van going south on South Shore Drive. A black Jeep pulled alongside them near 70th Street and someone inside opened fire, hitting him in the side and her in the head. They died at the scene, police said.

About 3:30 p.m., a shooter walked into Nadia Fish and Chicken at the corner of 75th and Coles and opened fire, according to family members of the victims. Emmanuel C. Stokes, 28, and Edwin Davis, 32, were fatally shot inside the restaurant, authorities said.

Two other men, Dillon and Raheam Jackson, ran from the restaurant as gunfire erupted, but both were fatally shot in different parking lots within a block of the restaurant. All four were pronounced dead at the scene, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office. Stokes and the Jacksons lived in South Shore; Davis was a Brainerd neighborhood resident, authorities said.

The neighborhood’s first slaying of the day happened shortly after noon inside an apartment in the 7500 block of South Luella. Patrice L. Calvin, a 26-year-old woman who was four months pregnant, was found unresponsive with a gunshot wound to the head in her apartment in the 7500 block of South Luella, authorities said. She was dead at the scene.

Dozens of onlookers gathered at the corner of 75th and Coles as police guarded the crime scene of the quadruple homicide, which spanned several blocks. The bodies of the Jackson brothers could be seen lying under white sheets, much to the frustration of family members.

A young woman screamed at officers to move the bodies of Raheam and Dillon — who she said were her brothers — out of the lightly misting rain.

“Real talk, this is gonna make me go f – – – – – – crazy,” she said. “Why they still on the ground?”

Dillon and Raheam Jackson had gone to the restaurant to visit their mother, who has worked there for eight years, according to their grandmother, Georgia Jackson.

“They were shooting at somebody, they say, inside the restaurant,” Georgia Jackson said. “My boys just got in the way, I guess.”

On Thursday night, CPD spokesman Anthony Guglielmi tweeted that the shooting is “believed to be gang related retaliation from another incident,” though he did not offer further specifics of that incident.

Georgia Jackson said Dillon Jackson was shot in his back three years ago just a block away.

“Dillon was a homebody,” she said. “I don’t understand why he out here. What’s he doing here?”

Family members said Dillon, 20, and Raheam, 19, were the youngest of five children. They had two older brothers and an older sister. Raheam left behind one son who will turn 2 years old on April 2 and another 5-month old son, according to his sister-in-law, Shauna Jackson.

They were not the first grandsons Georgia Jackson has lost to gun violence in Chicago.

In December 2011, her 16-year-old grandson Jawan Ross, a Robeson High School student, was one of two teen boys killed when someone fired into a crowd at a Church’s Chicken in the 6600 block of South Halsted. The Chicago Sun-Times reported then that Ross and 17-year-old Dantril Brown were unintended targets. Last fall, Arthur Chaney was convicted of the murders and sentenced to life in prison.

“I can’t keep doing this,” Georgia Jackson said. “I’m losing too many kids.”

Hours after the shooting, when most bystanders had left the area, she vowed to stay at the crime scene until her grandsons’ bodies were removed.

Agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were at the crime scene. An agency spokesman confirmed the ATF is assisting Chicago Police in the investigation.

The killings came at the end of a month, which at the start of the day had seen a 43 percent drop in homicides year-over-year, according to Chicago Police. March 2016 saw 46 homicides, while March 2017 recorded 26 before the seven homicides on Thursday in South Shore.

The rampage at 75th and Coles was the city’s first quadruple homicide of the year and came just a day after charges were filed in the Chicago’s last quadruple homicide, which occurred in Fernwood last December.

Chicago has seen more than 130 homicides through the first three months of 2017, according to records maintained by the Sun-Times. Seven other people were wounded in shootings across city on Thursday.