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Read the press release here.

Teen Fatally Shot In Front of Twin Brother

By Quinn Ford | October 10, 2013 10:04am
 Rasheed Trull, 16, was the youngest of three killed in South Shore Wednesday night.
Rasheed Trull
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SOUTH SHORE — When Lois Pickett's phone rang Wednesday night, the caller ID showed the call coming from her 16-year-old son Rasheed Trull's phone.

But it wasn't Rasheed calling. It was a boy telling her Rasheed had been shot.

"I said, 'What are you talking about Rasheed? I'm talking to you now,'" Pickett said.

On the other end of the line was Rasheed's twin brother, Raheem Trull.

"He was like, 'No mom, it's Rasheed'" who'd been shot, Pickett said.

Rasheed was the youngest of three people killed Wednesday night in the 6700 block of South Chappel Avenue in South Shore.

Rasheed and Raheem Trull were standing with three friends in a courtyard on the block about 8:40 p.m. when a red car pulled up and someone inside asked if anyone had any weed, witnesses said.

Then the men in the car pulled out a gun and started shooting, witnesses said.

Raheem took off running.

"I was scared. I just started running," Raheem said at his home Thursday morning. "Bullets, they just started flying, just kept flying. They missed me."

But his twin brother was hit in the hail of gunfire. Shot in his temple and right thigh, Rasheed was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital where he died in surgery about 11:20 p.m., family and authorities said.

Raheem and another person in the group were unharmed in the shooting, but Darius Morris, 23 was shot in his right shoulder and died at the scene. Sylvester Solomon, 27, was pronounced dead at Stroger Hospital after he was shot in the back and left arm, authorities said.

Raheem said he knew the two older men because the family used to live on South Clyde Avenue, a block east of where the shooting happened. Pickett said her sons knew the men through their oldest brother, Tatioun Williams, who was fatally shot by police in May 2011.

Family said they believed the older men, not the Trull twins, may have been the target of Wednesday's shooting.

Standing beneath a memorial poster of her eldest son in her living room, Loris Pickett cried as she wondered why anyone would want to shoot a teenager.

"If you want to shoot somebody, go fight a damn war somewhere," she said as Raheem stood next to her. "How are you going to kill our babies in our communities? Let them grow up. Let them try to grow up."

Rasheed was a good kid who stayed out of trouble, his mother said. He was shy and usually let his twin brother do the talking for him, Pickett said. Rasheed recently had started dating a girl, nicknamed "Sweetpea," who lived at 67th and Chappel. He was visiting her before the shooting.

Pickett said her sons, who are sophomores at Hyde Park Academy, kept busy doing things like mowing lawns in the neighborhood and putting bikes together, but Raheem said the two had dreams of becoming rappers.

He said he and his brother had been getting close to finishing their first song together.

"It was halfway finished," he said.

The second and third oldest of her five children, the twins were always together. If you saw one, you saw the other, Pickett said.

Pickett said detectives had spoken to her since the shooting.

"They said they're going to do the best they can to find out who did it and apprehend them, and that's the best they can do," she said.

But Raheem said he did not have much faith police would find his twin brother's killer.