Quantcast

The DNAinfo archives brought to you by WNYC.
Read the press release here.

Rogers Park Shooting Victim's Friend: 'He Was a Little Brother to Me'

By  Benjamin Woodard and Quinn Ford | April 15, 2014 7:11am | Updated on April 15, 2014 11:10am

 A worker cleans the sidewalk where Keno Glass, 16, was shot and killed early Tuesday, according to authorities and friends.
A worker cleans the sidewalk where Keno Glass, 16, was shot and killed early Tuesday, according to authorities and friends.
View Full Caption
DNAinfo/Benjamin Woodard (inset: YouTube)

ROGERS PARK — Keno Glass was an aspiring rapper who "didn't deserve" being shot and killed, but also struggled academically, friends and sources said.

The 16-year-old was killed in a drive-by shooting early Tuesday morning, the latest victim of gun violence in Rogers Park, authorities and friends said.

"He loved everyone around him; he didn’t deserve that out of all people," said Kenneth Sandy, 20, a long-time friend of Glass. "I couldn’t even stop crying last night. He was a little brother to me."

Sandy said Glass, an aspiring rapper also known as Kay Pee Lashore, had been returning from an interview regarding his music career.

About 2:40 a.m. he knocked on the first-floor window of his friends' apartment in the 7600 block of North Ashland Avenue.

Then four or five gunshots rang out.

Glass, of the 3500 block of West Walnut Street, was pronounced dead on the scene about 3 a.m., according to the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office.

Police said someone in a passing gray minivan had fired the gunshots that struck Glass, and a suspect in the shooting was being questioned.

Tuesday morning, a maintenance worker bleached the sidewalk where Glass was shot. Jasmine Padilla stood nearby and said she heard the shots from her apartment.

"Usually, they randomly shoot over here all the time," she said. "When I looked out the window, that's when I saw a lot of people crying, and that's when I saw his body laying there."

Glass had also been enrolled at Senn High School, but often didn't show up for class, said a source with knowledge of his community and academic situation.

The school system had "offered support on multiple occasions, inside and outside of school," the source said.

"He had trouble all the way through, from when he was little until now," the source said. "People tried to work with him ... and ultimately he made his own decisions."

A music video featuring Glass was posted on YouTube in the fall. The video appeared to have been shot in the basketball court at Senn Park on Ridge Avenue.

In the video, Glass references "Ls," a nickname for a faction of the Gangster Disciples street gang known as "Loyalty Over Cash," which for years has been feuding with another faction of the Gangster Disciples known as the Insane Cutthroat Gangsters near Morse and Farwell avenues.

Friends, though, said Glass wasn't a part of a gang.

"It’s not not gang s--- that’s going on," said Sandy, whose other friend, Blake Lamb, was shot and killed on Howard Street last summer. "It’s neighborhood s---. He got caught in the s---. This s--- hurts so bad. I don’t wish this on nobody. It’s just crazy."

Daisey Jaimes, 16, said she went to school with Glass at Senn.

"Keno was humble, he didn't like fights, he didn't like gangs," Jaimes said in a conversation on Twitter.

The shooting of Glass happened just two blocks from a Howard Street convenience store where 36-year-old Darnall Gordon was killed last week. Two other men also were injured in that shooting.

After Gordon's death last week, two other people were wounded in two separate shootings in the neighborhood.

In the last 12 months, at least five other people have been killed by gunfire in the Rogers Park neighborhood, including a 17-year-old Amundsen High School student who was killed in February outside a Clark Street McDonald's.

Anthony Boatman, a director at Rogers Park's A Just Harvest, works with at-risk neighborhood youths.

He said the recent violence was the result of the neighborhood feuds he's working to stop.

"You can’t talk about taking guns out of their hands unless you can put something else in them," Boatman said. "That way they have something better to do than killing each other."

Near the sidewalk where Glass was fatally shot, Padilla said she is sick of the violence.

"I mean, it's always going to be like this. I just need to move," said Padilla, who has lived in Rogers Park for two years. "I don't want to stay here. I have kids."

Fellow building resident Charlie Carter, 42, said the same.

"I just moved here myself," he said. "I’m trying to get away from all this gang violence."

Resident Antoine Hines' son attends Gale Math and Science Academy just across the street from where Glass was killed.

Hines said violence in the neighborhood was not "random" but tends to involve people associated with gangs.

"If you lived in this neighborhood and you didn't bother anybody, nobody's going to bother you," he said. "Anywhere you go in the city, you're going to have a block here [or] a block there you're not going to go to."

Still, Hines says Glass' death was tragic.

"I feel sorry that a 16-year-old boy got shot," he said. "Nobody wants to see that."