HUMBOLDT — An Austin teenager who his mother says still loved watching cartoons everyday was killed in a shooting Sunday night.
Jeffrey Stewart, 16, was shot in the chest before 7 p.m. and found by police near the 1100 block of North Pulaski Road, police News Affairs Officer Ron Gaines said. He was pronounced dead at Stroger Hospital at 7:50 p.m., according to the Cook County medical examiner's office.
Neighbor Miguel Arredondo, 25, said he heard the shots come from behind his house in the 1100 block of North Harding Avenue.
"We stayed in the house," Arredondo said. "We didn't peek out because that's another guy dead, just another day here."
Officers found another 16-year-old with a gunshot wound to his hand in the 1100 block of North Harding Street, Gaines said. Stewart, of the 5200 block of West Race Avenue, had apparently run a block west following that attack, Gaines said.
Stewart's mother Genita Lucious said the other teen is a close friend of her son, who had recently moved from Humboldt Park to Austin with her.
Lucious said her son, a sophomore at Roberto Clemente High School, would watch cartoons nearly every day before returning to his old neighborhood to spend time with his old friends.
"He was still a kid who would watch cartoons all day long before going out," Lucious said.
His brother or stepdad would always pick him up from the area around 8 or 9 p.m. That was the plan Sunday — to pick him up from the area around West Thomas Street and North Harding Avenue, an intersection neighbors say is notorious for criminal activity.
"This is common here," Arredondo said. "We can't walk out of our house without being offered drugs. We don't know who these people are. We don't know where they came from."
Stewart's family insisted that while some of his friends may have been in a gang, he was not.
"I would always tell my brother that bullets don't have a name," the victim's brother Jerome Lucious, 19, said. "We tried to keep him out of trouble as best we could."
