How so many innocent lives end in Chicago

There is so much shooting and killing in Chicago that news accounts of tragic incidents can fly past Chicagoans with the speed of a bullet: a moment of mayhem, incomplete details from the authorities, insufficient time for all of the people to reflect on the bloodshed before ... more mayhem.Thousands of people are shot in Chicago every year. Hundreds of them die. What most know of the precise moments when metal pierces flesh often is incomplete – the best that police officers and journalists can piece together after a shooting by talking with eyewitnesses and inspecting evidence. Sometimes there are fragments of information: “I heard something go past my ear, and it wasn’t a fly,” said Sebastian Moore, who might have been speaking metaphorically about all the gun violence but was recounting the day he fled a notorious South Side shooting. Moore didn’t realise until afterward that he’d been grazed in the foot.After some incidents, though, so many accounts and details pour forth that Chicagoans experience some cinematic replay of what occurred. These you-are-there insights teach the people of the senselessness of Chicago violence. Teaches them how much a mindless murder tears at the fabric of a community, of a city. Moore experienced one of those incidents as a high school student on January 29, 2013: the spray of gunshots that killed 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton. She was mourned and was not forgotten.Now details of her life and death are being retold in court as the alleged shooter and getaway driver stand trial for murder. Each day’s testimony transports Chicagoans back to a moment – to one killing among so many killings, each with a story that climaxes in seconds.Hadiya was an honour student at King College Prep High, hanging out with classmates in Kenwood’s Harsh Park after taking final exams. The friends were gathered under a metal canopy when gunfire erupted. The classmates started running, Moore and Klyn Jones among them. “I turned around and (Hadiya) was running still, but she was obviously slowing down,” Jones testified. “And then she grabbed her chest and said, ‘I think I got shot.’”Jordan Dillon, another classmate, slowed his pace as Hadiya faltered. “You could start to see the blood in the middle of her back,” he said on the witness stand. Two classmates tried to comfort Hadiya as she fell. “I grabbed her and put her on my lap,” Danetria Hudson testified, weeping. “I tried to find a bullet wound, but I couldn’t find it.” Hudson said she’d noticed the outline – a “silhouette” – of the presumed shooter, someone in dark-coloured clothes. Another student said he could positively identify the gunman.That’s pretty much the story. No hourlong TV drama, no unique and ambiguous plot twist. Instead, Chicagoans learn how, in the instant between calm and chaos, unexpected gunfire dropped one more Chicago teenager to the ground.Prosecutors allege that defendants Micheail Ward and Kenneth Williams were members of the SUWU street gang who mistakenly targeted the high schoolers as members of the rival 4-6 Terror gang. Hadiya Pendleton’s death hit Chicago as hard as the killing of every youngster should. All of us should remember her life. But we also should remember, from the moments before her death, how easily and abruptly gunplay can steal a life. – Tribune News Service