New Year’s weekend saw violence in Chicago that left at least five people shot dead and 25 others injured from shootings.
The shootings include a man in his 20s who was killed on Saturday in the West Side while driving. Police said someone in another car fired a gun and shot the man in the head. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.
A drive-by shooting on Friday killed one person and left two others injured in the West Side. The same day, a 58-year-old man was shot while driving a Volvo in the South Side, causing him to crash his car. He was later pronounced dead.
The shootings cap off a year that was riddled with skyrocketing shootings and homicides in the city. Homicides increased by 50% in 2020, with at least 774 people killed. There were 506 homicides in the city in 2019.
The bloodiest day in Chicago was on May 31, when 18 people were killed. The shootings came after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day weekend, which sparked riots and protests across the country.
“We’ve never seen anything like it at all,” Max Kapustin, a researcher at the lab, said of the crime wave. “I don’t even know how to put it into context. It’s beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before.”
Other cities saw an increase in violent crimes in 2020, including in New York City, where at least 1,480 shootings occurred and homicides shot up by 40%.
