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| Bullet hole in the window of a Buckingham Place home. |
While late night revelers mingled on Halsted Street and Market Days work crews broke down the festival’s tents, at least two shots were fired just steps away in the 700 block of Buckingham Place early Monday morning. One round, possibly a ricochet, crashed through a resident’s front window. Another became lodged in a parked car. No one is known to have been struck.
Multiple calls of shots fired lit up the 911 call center at 1AM Monday morning. The calls came from the areas of Halsted and Buckingham as well as Broadway and Buckingham.
Moments after the shots rang out—and prior to our learning of the shots fired calls—a CWB reader with firearms experience approached an editor on the street to report hearing the shots, seeing pedestrians take cover on Broadway, and then seeing four people run east on Buckingham to Broadway where they split off into pairs: two running north and two running south.
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| The seemingly sleepy 700 block of Buckingham Place. |
Officers at the time found a citizen who reported hearing two shots, but an off-duty officer working Market Days security said he heard no shots and the calls were deemed “not bona fide.”
That changed around 7:45 yesterday evening when a woman called police to report finding a bullet in her home. And the bullet was still there. An officer took the bullet for inventory, but evidence technicians were not called because the bullet had been handled by the homeowner. (CPD case HX384991.)
A police source tells CWB that a second bullet was found in a parked car, believed to also have been on Buckingham.
Confirmation of Monday morning’s incident means that gunshots have rung out this year following two of Boystown’s annual cornerstone events: Market Days and the Chicago Pride Parade.
Organizers and politicians are sure to dismiss Monday’s gunfire as “not related” to Market Days. They would have a hard time making that statement had Monday’s rounds taken even slightly different trajectories toward Halsted Street.
