An eight-year-old girl was shot and killed in Chicago on Saturday, in a weekend that saw dozens of people shot as the Democrat-run city continues to struggle with violence.
Twenty-seven people were shot, seven fatally, over the weekend. One of the victims was Sarabi Medina, an eight-year-old girl, who was shot by a neighbor who complained the child was too loud.
Medina was riding her scooter when the man approached and shot her in the head. The girl's father tackled the assailant, who was shot in the face during the struggle and is now in critical condition.
"Just little kids playing, he would come out just yelling about the noise. It just didn’t make sense, none of it made sense," neighbor Megan Kelley told the Chicago Sun-Times. "Everybody in the community would just tell him they are just kids having fun playing, just let them be."
The girl's mother died in a 2019 shooting.
Also this weekend, a 14-year-old Chicago male was in critical condition after receiving two gunshot wounds to the head. Police had no one in custody as of Monday morning.
The weekend shootings are the latest episode of violence in the city.
Just last week, two USPS mail carriers were robbed at gunpoint within minutes of each other, with one of them shot and in critical condition.
Crime increased by 38 percent in the month after new progressive mayor Brandon Johnson (D.) took office in May. Robberies are up 17 percent compared with this time last year, according to police data, and are up by 30 percent in the past three years.
Johnson's campaign called for "health professionals, not police" to "respond to crisis calls." He was the only mayoral candidate who did not back filling the city's police vacancies, which number more than 1,500 positions.
Former mayor Lori Lightfoot saw the homicide rate skyrocket nearly 40 percent since taking office in 2019, watchdog Wirepoints reported. She now works as a teaching fellow at Harvard University.