This year’s homicide count in Chicago has topped 500 following a bloody Labor Day weekend in which 13 people were shot to death.
According to the Chicago Tribune, 31 of the 65 people shot over the holiday weekend were wounded between 6 a.m. Monday and 3 a.m. Tuesday. Nine fatal shootings took place during that time.
Homicides now stand at 512 total for so far in 2016. In all of 2015 there were 491 homicides in the city.
Labor Day is now the deadliest summer holiday weekend in Chicago.
The Memorial Day weekend saw 69 shot, six of them fatally, and the Fourth of July weekend had 66 shootings that left five dead.
August has been the city’s deadliest single month in 20 years. Ninety people were killed in Chicago in August, tying the a high from June 1996. The worst month prior to that was July 1993 in which 99 people were shot dead.
Gun violence has not been so prevalent in Chicago since the 1990s, when homicides peaked at more than 900 annually. According to the Tribune, more than 2,930 people have been shot this year in Chicago.
New York and Los Angeles are bigger cities, but homicides and shootings in Chicago outpace them both. According to the most recent publicly available official statistics, New York and Los Angeles had a combined 409 homicides so far in 2016.
