A 17-year-old boy is in critical condition and a 16-year-old girl has a graze wound after someone shot them as they walked near Clarendon Park in Uptown on Monday evening, police said. Neither victim has had previous contact with police, according to CPD.
Police officers assigned to the area reported hearing shots fired at 8:28 p.m. They arrived at the scene in time to see a vehicle leave the scene with the boy inside. Officers followed the vehicle to nearby Weiss Memorial Hospital, where the teen was found to have gunshot wounds to his back, hip, thigh, and calf. He was subsequently transferred to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center.
Video recorded from a nearby high rise shows police arriving at the scene as a small group of people stand with the fallen girl on a basketball court in the park:
Bullets shattered the glass of a CTA bus shelter on the 4400 block of North Clarendon and shell casings were found lying on the street. Sun-Times photojournalist Tyler LaRiviere tweeted a photo that shows a Divvy bike lying on the sidewalk behind the damaged shelter.
As mentioned earlier this bus shelter was shot out and there’s an abandoned divvy bike behind it. #Chicago #ChicagoScanner pic.twitter.com/WaZuPP9JZ2
— Tyler LaRiviere (@TylerLaRiviere) July 6, 2021
Police said the gunman might have fired on the couple from a black sedan that was traveling southbound on Clarendon. Area Three detectives are investigating.
Six people have been shot in Uptown so far this year. That compares to eight at this point last year and in 2019, according to city records.