MCT/Chicago
Shamiya Adams was sitting on a bedroom floor in her best friend’s home, making s’mores after an evening of practising a dance routine, when a shot ripped through the house in Garfield Park.
The bullet crashed through the wall of the bedroom and struck the 11-year-old in the head. She was rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital, where family kept an overnight vigil until the girl was pronounced dead at 7:33am on Saturday.
“They came out and told us she wasn’t going to make it,” Shamiya’s grandmother said. “Oh, my God.”
As the night wore on, about 40 people joined hands outside the hospital, forming a circle and praying.
“Just be with us, God. We need you now,” a woman pleaded as a black SUV filled with police rolled past. “We need you now like never before.”
Thirteen hours later, as police searched for the gunman, marshmallows and Hershey bars were still spread out on the bed, remnants of a summer sleepover turned tragic.
Traces of the girl’s blood could be seen just beneath a stuffed Tweety Bird doll hanging from the bedroom wall.
“Everybody was in the room,” said Aaron Hill, who lives at the house but said he wasn’t there at the time of the shooting. “They were just doing their girlie things. They heard shots and a bullet came through the window.”
Hill said Shamiya was best friends with one of his younger daughters. She had a “big smile,” he said while choking back tears on his porch in East Garfield Park, just a couple blocks from the Eisenhower Expressway.
At the hospital, community activist Andrew Holmes urged the public to call authorities with information about the shooting. “We don’t want these perpetrators on the street to rest nowhere tonight.”
Earlier, a 12-year-old girl was wounded, one of more than 20 people wounded over 12 hours on Friday and early Saturday in Chicago.
The girl, along with a 33-year-old woman and a 44-year-old man, were attacked in the 700 block of North Ridgeway Avenue about 3:30pm, police said. The girl suffered a graze wound to the foot, and the woman suffered a non-life-threatening gunshot wound above her right eye.
Their conditions were stabilised at John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital, said Chicago Police Department News Affairs Offier Veejay Zala. The man suffered a graze wound to the right calf and declined medical treatment, Zala said.
The victims told police they were approached by someone they didn’t know, who fired shots at them.
Eleven-year-old Shamiya Adams in an undated image. She was killed by gunfire on July 18 in her Chicago apartment building.
