As Chicago endures rise in number of young shooting victims, 3 are killed and 9 injured in less than 2 weeks
CHICAGO — A bullet was still lodged in De’ajah Blizzard’s head Wednesday afternoon, but even so, her mother felt things were looking up for the girl.
“They asked her to open her eyes and move her hands and she did,” Brenda Ibarra Boyd said of her daughter De’ajah, 11. “So much hope.”
Boyd pulled her pink fleece tighter around her as she sat on a bench outside of Comer Children’s Hospital, where she had remained almost continuously since last weekend, when a bullet fired during an argument outside hit De’ajah in the head while she was inside her home in West Englewood that Sunday.
De’ajah, who makes herself omelets and plays volleyball and did not want to eat the chicken mole her mother planned to make for dinner the day she was shot, was one of 12 children between the ages of 10 and 17 shot in Chicago between Oct. 30 and Nov. 10. Three of those 12 — each a 16-year-old boy — were killed in separate shootings in the city’s Austin, Avalon Park and East Side neighborhoods.
Data from the Cook County medical examiner’s office shows the city is in the midst of a sustained uptick in gun-related juvenile killings. Fifty-five kids age 17 and younger have been shot to death in Chicago since the start of the year. In all of 2022, 66 juveniles were shot and killed in Chicago.
In 2019, the figure was 38. The city saw 49 youth killings the following year. And in 2021, the total rose again to 58, according to the medical examiner’s office.
The increase in gun-related youth homicides comes as the overall number of killings in Chicago is down more than 10% from 2022, according to Chicago police statistics. Through the first week of November, the Chicago Police Department had initiated 534 murder investigations this year.
Some, like De’ajah or the 10-year-old boy shot in the chest while inside his home in the Burnside neighborhood on the South Side, appear to have been injured accidentally. Others, like Aurelio Guzman Jr., appear to have died as targets of gang violence.
Aurelio Guzman Sr. thinks his son had a friend who was involved with the Latin Kings.
“I’m pretty sure that he was connected with somebody that was hanging around with those bad guys,” he said. “I’m not sure what was the reason they killed him. But he didn’t deserve it.”
Six miles south of De’ajah’s hospital room, Guzman and his family rearranged candles and artificial flowers before the small cross they’d placed on the 9900 block of South Avenue G.
Aurelio, who was 16 and went by “Junior,” was killed Oct. 31, one of three children to be shot in the South Chicago District over two days. Junior was found with a single gunshot wound under his ear. A 14-year-old was shot on the 7600 block of South Chicago Avenue, and Ameer McMullin, 16, was fatally shot on the 1900 block of East 87th Street.
Like homicides, nonfatal shootings are down citywide about 13% compared with 2022, according to CPD data. Police records show the South Chicago District is one of two CPD patrol districts to see an increase in the number of shooting incidents from 2022 to 2023.
“It is heartbreaking to see gun violence affect our youth,” a CPD spokesperson said in a statement to the Tribune. “No child should experience the trauma of gun violence and no family should experience the pain of losing a child. We will support and stand alongside these victims and families as our detectives work to seek justice on their behalf.”
Dr. Kenneth Wilson, a trauma surgeon at University of Chicago Medicine, said children who survive being shot are left with trauma that they may carry forever.
“When you’re (10 to 17 years old) you think you’re 20 feet tall and bulletproof at that point in time, and now you’ve been touched by almost dying,” Wilson said. “You’re looking down at an abdominal scar and people are looking down at a colostomy bag. You talk about the terms like ‘shell shock,’ ‘PTSD.’ They got it. Looking at their future, you have to figure out now how does that kid become an adult that is functioning normally.”
The toll is especially high for kids living in the same area where they were shot, Wilson said.
“Imagine in this case you’re actually just returning to the community (where) you got shot to begin with,” Wilson added. “The same lack of opportunities in education, the same dysfunctional home that you came from, the same unsafe neighborhood. So, yeah, you gotta believe that it extends just beyond the event. It extends for the rest of their lives.”
Wilson said that more than half of UChicago Medicine’s pediatric trauma patients — 55% — are under 14 years old. Forty-five percent of those patients, he added, are admitted for treatment after dark.
“How the hell is almost half of our penetrating violence happening in this age range when the streetlights are on?” Wilson said.
What’s more, young people who survive a brush with gun violence are at an elevated risk of being shot again.
Guzman said it took a while to get Junior to the hospital, though he’d been found at 5:45 a.m.
“They didn’t report it until later because they thought it was a joke or something,” he said. “They were shaking him, like ‘wake up, wake up,’ and he wouldn’t wake up.”
Guzman has been up and down the block where his son died dozens of times since then. At the memorial on Wednesday, he pulled out his phone to show a Tribune reporter the video he’d taken of a handful of leaves covered in blood, smearing his fingers.
He swiped to a photo of his son at Trinity Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Then back to a picture of the boy crumpled in the park. He died feet away from where he played basketball with his brother Silvestre and where they would go swimming in Lake Michigan.
Guzman gestured down the street to a man in a neon vest. The man had told him he saw someone running away around midnight, he said. Guzman’s trying to get ahold of video footage of the shooting. He swiped back to the picture of his son’s body where he died. Junior had his hands in his jacket pockets.
“He was cold,” Guzman said. “That means he was still alive.”
He has spent a lot of time wondering if Junior was screaming for help when he was shot. He has spent a lot of time wondering how long his son lay dying in Calumet Park. He found himself lying in bed with the window open on Monday night.
“I was looking at the moon,” he said. “It got together with a little light. That was my son.”
He sat with the window open for two hours.
“For sure, that was him,” he said. “And nothing is going to bring him back.”
He said sleep has been hard to come by.
Back in Hyde Park outside the hospital on Wednesday, Brenda Ibarra Boyd rubbed her eyes. The doctors told her the previous night was a critical one for De’ajah, so she hadn’t slept until 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.’
But the swelling in her daughter’s brain had gone down, and her condition was stable enough that she’d be able to undergo surgery to remove something in her throat. Boyd said the doctors were just calling it a foreign object.
That afternoon, a physical therapist helped De’ajah sit up for the first time since Sunday. They FaceTimed her seven siblings together, though they had to keep it short because the excitement was bad for her blood pressure.
A hospital social worker gave them two stuffed hippopotamuses, one for De’ajah and one for her twin sister, La’dajah. Boyd asked La’dajah to read to her youngest son from a book the hospital had given them along with the hippos, titled “When Bad Things Happen.”
She was angry that her daughter was in the hospital and not in her sixth grade classroom.
They hear gunshots in their neighborhood “all the time,” Boyd said. She and her husband are always telling their kids, “You can’t do this. You can’t do that. Don’t go here. Don’t go there. You can’t play outside.”
“They can’t even play in their house because bullets are going to come through the windows,” she said. “What do we have to do, get bulletproof windows just to be on the safe side?”
She said that felt unfair too.
De’ajah underwent surgery for the foreign object in her throat on Thursday. It turned out to be metal from the round that struck her. Her recovery was beginning.
