GARFIELD PARK — The West Side was home to two eerily similar crime scenes Monday night.
Both shootings, occuring about nine blocks apart, left men in their 30s dead or dying by the time police found them, according to officials. Both men lay on the porches of gray, apparently vacant two-flat apartment buildings after being shot. And both happened at the height of a rainstorm, within about 25 minutes of each other.
First, at 9:05 p.m., police responded to a call of shots fired in the 4300 block of West Van Buren Street, where they found a 32-year-old man unconscious with gunshot wounds in his head and torso. He was taken to Stroger Hospital, where doctors pronounced him dead. The Cook County Medical Examiner's office identified the victim as Tavaris Heightie of the 5000 block of West North Avenue.
Then, around 9:30 p.m., police found a 37-year-old man with gunshot wounds in his neck and back lying on a porch in the 3800 block of West Monroe Street. Police said paramedics pronounced the man dead at the scene, and officers found a woman nearby with a gunshot wound in her arm who said she'd been involved in the same shooting. Medical examiners identified the man as William D. Andrews, Jr. of the 3800 block of West Monroe Street.
"It's just too close to home. ... I got two grandbabies living here with me, and it's gotten so I don't even want them going outside anymore," said a woman who lives two houses down from the site of the second murder. She said only minutes before the shooting she'd been selling snow cones outside her home, but she ran inside when it started pouring rain. Once in her living room, she heard "six or eight" gunshots.
"Thank God I went in — I don't want to think about what might've happened if I'd been out there," added the woman, who declined to give her name.
Some residents on the block said the violence seems to be getting worse every summer. Last summer, they noted, 21-year-old Shambreyh Barfield was shot dead on the same block.
"I don't know what's going on around here, but it's getting crazy — every summer's been worse than the last," said Brenda, another woman who lives on the block and withheld her last name. "I think I'm getting about ready to move away."
Near the site of the first murder, other residents felt similarly.
"It's scary — it's like we got our own little Iraq over here," said Curley Edwards, who lives across the street from the Van Buren Street shooting. "I been living here 45 years now, and I ain't never seen it like this."
Police said they had no further information about suspects or a motive in the shootings.
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