CHICAGO — A man who walked into a Lakeview hospital on Monday afternoon, claiming he had been shot in the head in Streeterville, may not have been telling the truth, a law enforcement source said.
The 26-year-old was initially uncooperative with police and then claimed that he had been shot on a sidewalk near Navy Pier, close to a hotel with a name that starts with “S.”
In a media statement, Chicago police listed the 300 block of East North Water Street as the shooting location. The Sheraton Grand Chicago Riverwalk Hotel is located on that block.
However, CPD did not receive any calls for shots fired in the area, which is quite busy during the lunch hour.
The victim arrived at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, five miles from the shooting scene, shortly after 1 p.m., with family members in tow. They were equally uncooperative with the police, we are told.
About 15 minutes before he walked into the hospital, police in Uptown arrested a man and recovered a gun during a disturbance in the 4900 block of North Kenmore. A witness told the officers that they saw the detained man fire a shot and throw the gun before they arrived.
And cops who patrol Uptown, which is much closer to Masonic, are quite familiar with the shooting victim. He has been arrested in Uptown 15 times since becoming an adult in 2016.
Police were unable to immediately confirm that shots were fired in Uptown, but a source yesterday said the Uptown scenario was shaping up to be more likely than the Streeterville story.
CWBChicago has also learned that the same man walked into Rush Hospital a few hours later for treatment of the same gunshot wound. This time, a source said, he told police that he was shot on Wacker Drive.
Coincidentally, the last time anything newsworthy happened on the 300 block of East North Water Street was January 29, 2019, when Jussie Smollett claimed that two Black men beat him in a racist, pro-Trump rampage.
