WEST RIDGE — For the second time in a year, stray bullets sprayed the otherwise quiet apartment of a mother and daughter in West Ridge — with one passing through a window and shattering their flat-screen TV while it was being watched.
“It’s all over [the area],” said Khoshobo Khay, 50, an Iraqi who emigrated to the United States in 1995. “Shots. Problems. Too much problems, you know. They have to have somebody control these people. They crazy outside shooting, killing people. Somebody has to control this because really we are scared.”
Khay and her daughter were home on May 28 — one scrubbing dishes in the kitchen, the other watching television in the living room — when gunshots began popping outside and the apartment’s front window shattered into a mosaic of glass shards that sparkled up dangerously from the floor.
Chicago Police officers later would recover three .40 caliber bullets from inside the apartment in the 6000 block of North Mozart Street in West Ridge. One round they pulled from an interior wall, and an additional four empty casings were collected on the street outside the building, according to the May 28 police report of the incident.
It was not the first time bullets presumably intended for someone else had found the little apartment on Mozart Street. About a year ago another salvo of shots had hit the outer walls of the unit, causing minor damage but no injuries, according to Khay, 50.
Khay, who shares the apartment with her 31-year-old daughter, said she found another bullet in the wall when officers finally left after 1 a.m. after the latest shooting, bringing the total to four. Khay said that she and her daughter had heard separate gunshots about 10 minutes earlier that night and thought another window in the building had been shot out, too. They didn’t realize it at the time, but their apartment was up next.
In the police report of the incident, officers responding to a "shots fired" call about 12:35 a.m. near North Fairfield and West Glenlake avenues encountered the two women, who had stepped out of their apartment to ask if police had come about their broken window.
“The TV, it go in the garbage,” Khay said after a bullet hit their flat-screen and destroyed it. “It cost $700-$800 dollars. It broke.”
Khay had been the one in the kitchen, her daughter watching the television from the couch, when the shots hit the apartment. They were lucky the destruction of an expensive TV was all that was lost that night.
“I was walking to the living room, my daughter throw herself on the floor and say, ‘Get down! Get down!” according to Khay, who is employed through a temp agency. “We from Iraq ... been in Chicago since March 1995. Never had a problem with violence, robbery before.”
Khay's daughter declined to comment.
Both women lead quiet lives, working and then going home to eat, spending time with each other, and sleeping.
“I just go shopping, go work, and stay home,” Khay said. “I never walk. Just take my car. I sleep, that’s it. Same thing for her.”
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