Members of the Chicago Police Department work the scene where at least six people were shot, one fatally, on the 8600 block of South Maryland Avenue Sunday, Dec. 25, 2016 in Chicago.
The Gill brothers spent Christmas night at a family party in East Chatham, shooting dice with their cousins on the front porch of a brick house.
The weather was good for December, and the game had been going for a while. Then, at 9:20 p.m., someone in a gray hoodie came through the south alley and opened fire.
The gunshots were so loud and so close together that a neighbor across the street thought someone was tapping at his window.
When he came out of his house to look, Anthony Marshall saw a porch crowded with screaming people. One man had fallen to the floor. Another was being propped up by a friend. Someone came to the bottom of the stairs and yelled at the people to get back inside.
It was so crowded and chaotic that he was surprised more people weren’t hurt, he said.
“It seemed like it was going to be a pretty decent weekend. Christmas, no shooting, then boom,” he said.
James Gill, 18, was pronounced dead on the porch of the house in the 8600 block of South Maryland Avenue. His body stayed at the scene covered in a white sheet. His older brother, 21-year-old Roy, went to Advocate Christ Medical Center in critical condition and was pronounced dead there.
Five other people were wounded in the shooting, most of them relatives of the Gill brothers, family said. Two were listed in critical condition.
About half an hour later, James and Roy’s father called their sister Kim with the news.
She drove to the scene without putting on good socks or a winter coat. She called James’ cellphone over and over, until she noticed a police officer carrying it.
“When I called, he looked down and cut the ringer,” she said.
Police then stretched the crime scene tape across Maryland Avenue. It took a few different lengths of tape knotted together to reach the other side. The pieces tangled up in the middle of the roadway like clumps of seaweed.
One woman stood next to the tape without her hat or coat or phone. She had left the house in a hurry after the shooting. It was just a family party, she said, trying to explain what happened. “And it’s Christmas!”
A group of young men walked to the corner. She sized them up as they approached.
“Look soft,” she told them. “You all look hard.”
Just before 11 p.m., a detective gathered a few people toward 87th Street and spoke quietly. Roy Gill had died at the hospital, he told them, according to Kim Gill.
The brothers’ mother began to scream and collapsed into the man next to her. Her screaming attracted attention. Soon the crowd was 20-strong.
They parted to make way for the mother. She couldn’t walk. Three people grabbed her elbows and knees to carry her down the sidewalk. She hadn’t stopped crying.
“It’s unexplainable, this hurt, the absence,” Kim Gill said. “I don’t even know how it’s going to feel yet.”
She had cooked for the holiday, and had invited James over for pot roast, greens and sweet potatoes. She had bought a bottle of YSL cologne to give him.
“He was a kindhearted person,” she said.
James and Roy both held jobs and were attending Malcolm X College to get their GEDs, Kim Gill said.
“I talk to my brothers all the time about this. It’s messed up in these streets,” she said.
In response, they would tell her: “We know, sis, we know.”
Many of the seven people who were shot had criminal records, and at least one was affiliated with the Gangster Disciples, according to preliminary information from a law enforcement source.
The brothers were getting their lives together, Kim Gill said, and they didn’t usually associate with people they didn’t know.
“All the people that got shot and killed was family,” she said. “That ought to tell you something, right there.”
But she didn’t know who stayed at the house, she said, and they were out in a crowd, so it was anyone’s guess who the shooter was aiming for.
“This is Chicago,” she said. “You don’t need a reason.”
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune – Megan Crepeau
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