Chicago bloodshed continues: 6 hurt, 5 dead in separate gun attacks

One day after 13 people were shot and wounded in a Chicago park, a rash of separate shootings erupted across the city overnight Friday and into Saturday morning leaving five dead and at least six injured, police said.

The latest shooting involved a 51-year-old man who was wounded in the stomach just after 5:30 a.m., a spokesman for the Chicago police department told The Times.

Between 1:30 p.m. Friday and 4 a.m. Saturday, eight other shootings left five dead and four injured -- with victims ranging from 14 to 41 years old, the Chicago Tribune reported.

On Friday afternoon, two of the shootings took place minutes apart. In the city’s South Side, a 14-year-old was shot dead just after 1:30 p.m., and about 15 minutes later, a man in his 20s was injured by gunfire in the Portage Park neighborhood, according to the Chicago Tribune.

One shooting involved officers of the Chicago Police Department, who were pursuing a man wanted in connection with a burglary in the Northwest side of the city, NBC5 reported. Officers shot that man after he tried to drive his car into a police car. He was arrested and taken to a local hospital for medical treatment.

At a South Side church Friday night, residents, family members of the shooting victims and Mayor Rahm Emanuel gathered for a peace vigil. Emanuel urged city residents to unite to end gun violence.

“We cannot allow children in the city of Chicago, and we will not allow the children in the city of Chicago, to have their youthfulness, their optimism, their hope taken from them. That’s what gun violence does. That is wrong,” Emanuel said in broadcast statements.

The latest gun violence comes one day after 17 were injured and one killed in multiple unrelated shootings across the city, including a mass shooting in a South Side park that left 13 injured.

The gunman in the park used an assault rifle, an attack the drew national attention and put the spotlight on the city’s ongoing crime problem.

Police said they are investigating the park shooting but believe it is tied to ongoing gang activity. Emanuel condemned the shootings, calling them “senseless and brazen” in a statement released Friday.

Chicago had the highest homicide rate in the nation in 2012, with 500 killings, according to FBI statistics. Los Angeles, with about a million more residents than Chicago, had 299 homicides last year.

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