Teba Stewart stood at the center of a group of friends and family in the beating sun late Tuesday afternoon on the former Cabrini-Green apartments site and addressed a cardboard cutout of her son, Ashawn Davis.
Ashawn, 13, was shot and killed late Sunday night in the Edgewater neighborhood. Stewart, standing amid bunches of light blue balloons and family wearing blue and white, said she just wanted her son back.
“Oh, man, what am I going to do?” Stewart said. “I know you didn’t deserve this.”
Brian Baillie, Ashawn’s flag football coach, stood beside the circle. Ashawn, the team’s quarterback, was “highly intelligent,” he said and a quiet kind of leader.
“He did it in a really quiet, kind of stoic way,” Baillie said. “He was more of a lead-by-example than a rally the troops kind of guy.”
“He was just a good, fun kid to be around,” he said.
Stewart said Ashawn was “a loving person” who cherished his two big sisters, ages 15 and 18. His favorite car was a Dodge Hellcat and he was a “TikTok King” who loved music and dancing, she said.
She last spoke to him when “he was supposed to come home,” she said. She’d been planning to travel for her 37th birthday and wanted him to see her before she left.
According to a police report obtained through a Freedom of Information request, officers found Ashawn with a gunshot wound to the eye. A witness told officers she heard a single gunshot and saw three young men running out of the apartment where Ashawn was found. Another witness told officers he heard the three young men say that Ashawn had shot himself by accident, according to the report.
The Cook County medical examiner’s office did not release a cause of death for the boy after a Tuesday autopsy.
The building where police were seen coming in and out Monday morning has seen a slew of shootings over the summer and neighbors said had been a magnet for fights, shootings and other policy activity for years.
Police said there was no one in custody in connection with the shooting and area detectives were investigating.
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