CHICAGO — As Darius Farley drove home with his 19-year-old brother in tow, he told a joke that had them both laughing when suddenly shots rang out, Farley’s mother said.
“He told his brother to get down,” Coree Parks. Both men were struck by bullets that night of June 5.
As Farley tried to flee, he struck a CTA bus near 68th Street and Calumet Avenue.
Farley was killed, struck in the chest while on the 6800 block of South Calumet Avenue. He was pronounced dead at Northwestern hospital, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.
“It went from being a happy moment to something sad,” Parks said.
She said it isn’t clear why a gunman approached the car and shot her son. It could have been a robbery, road rage or a case of mistaken identity, Parks said.
Farley, of Englewood, and his brother were in the Park Manor neighborhood visiting a girl, Parks said.
Farley, who had taken a year off from school, was supposed to return to Daley College this fall.
He didn’t know what career he wanted to pursue, his mother said.
And although fashion was a passion — he was known for his sharp sense of style — the biggest love of his life was his little sister, Kyrsten. Farley also had three brothers.
The two spent hours sitting on the porch of their Englewood home.
“He gave her everything she wasn’t supposed to have,” Parks recalls with a smile.
Parks gazes at pictures in her cell phone of the toddler drinking from her brother’s juice bottles.
“Whenever he had his sister, you could see the joy,” Parks said.
And when the family asks Kyrsten where her beloved older brother went she simply answers: “Gone.”
