Tumbo Brooks scrubbed the sweat from his face with a grey washcloth Tuesday night as he hurried down East 71st Street to the police tape. Arne Duncan stood at the intersection, staring south down South Ridgeland Avenue at 30 shell casings.
The men caught one another in a quick hug and turned back to the tape. The person shot had been working as a peacekeeper, they said, meant to use his own close street relationships around South Shore to prevent further violence. They did not yet know how badly he had been hurt. He was the fourth peacekeeper to be shot over the last several weeks, Brooks said.
Police sources said the 33-year-old shooting victim had been headed inside an apartment building around 7:20 p.m. at the intersection when three people, driving in a grey car, drove past and started firing. The victim said the shooters may have had a Glock switch, which turns a semi-automatic pistol into a fully automatic weapon.
The man was shot six times and was taken in good condition to University of Chicago Hospital, according to police. Officers also found a second 36-year-old man with a cut on his leg, who was taken to South Shore Hospital.
The man who was shot Tuesday was one of about 1,200 peacekeepers paid to deescalate conflicts and prevent possible retaliation in a specific set of city blocks. Altogether, the program assigns people to about 200 locations around the city and a few suburbs.
Chicago, Cook County and Illinois have gone for big investments in this kind of violence prevention effort, which research has shown is a promising way to chip away at Chicago’s stubborn levels of gun violence. Earlier on Tuesday, Duncan, the managing director of anti-gun violence organization Chicago CRED, had spoken at a gathering that served partly as a celebration of the city’s dipping crime rate and partly as an announcement of plans to expand intervention work.
But most people working as peacekeepers are only a short distance removed from street life, making them targets for violence even as they are involved in efforts to stop it. Some of the people gathered for the celebration Tuesday had a coworker killed days before: another peacekeeper, 43-year-old Prince Johnson, was fatally shot Friday night in the Riverdale neighborhood on the South Side.
Hours later, in South Shore, Brooks paced in circles, making phone calls. Besides Johnson and the man who had just been wounded, two other peacekeepers had also been shot in recent weeks, he said.
Duncan watched an orange cat step between the shell casings as detectives and evidence technicians examined nearby cars and buildings. He wore khaki shorts, sneakers and a t-shirt that read #MakePeaceCool.
“People who are trying to help create peace are still victims of violence,” he said. “We got a long way to go as a city.”
Ald. Desmon Yancy, 5th, was disappointed to find himself at the scene of shooting, especially given how the year had been going.
“That stretch of 71st Street had actually been much quieter than in previous summers,” he said. “So there was some comfort and some hope that that bad behavior was behind us.”
As of Tuesday night, police had no one in custody and area detectives were still investigating the shooting.
