4 dead in restaurant shooting: ‘It is not OK. It is not OK when we lose a child like this’

Chicago Tribune

When the shooting stopped, two young men lay dead inside the South Shore restaurant Thursday afternoon, another was dead outside and a fourth was found dead around the corner, slumped against a tree.

Paramedics draped a sheet over the man outside the Nadia Fish and Chicken restaurant at 75th Street and Coles Avenue as his mother grieved.  

“It is not OK. It is not OK when we lose a child like this,” she said as officers guided her and others away from the body. “There’s two dead — there’s two other boys in there.”

Still wearing a red apron from her job at the restaurant, the mother pounded her fists on the hood of a blue-and-white police SUV parked across Coles from her son’s body.

Three ambulances arrived in minutes but left almost as quickly because the first three people they found were all pronounced dead at the scene.

Officers ran toward a commotion farther south and found the fourth victim behind an apartment building on Coles, slumped against a tree. It was the woman’s other son.

Soon afterward, a man tried to walk along a barbed-wire fence that he had climbed to get behind the building, telling police the victim was his brother.

An exasperated look came over an officer’s face as he looked to the ground while two other officers started pushing people back.

One child still carrying his backpack, the hood of his winter coat pulled over his head, looked at the body and turned away. A woman put her hand on his back and guided him back toward 75th.

The four were fatally shot about 3:50 p.m. A gunman approached the restaurant and fired. It was not immediately clear how many of the four victims were in the restaurant.

Dillon Jackson, 20, was found dead outside the restaurant. His brother, Raheem Jackson, 19, was found against the tree. Emmanuel Stokes, 28, was inside the restaurant with Edwin Davis, 32.

The shooting may have been part of an internal gang conflict involving the Black P Stones gang, in retaliation for the killing of a 37-year-old man in the 7900 block of South Phillips Avenue about 11:15 p.m. Wednesday, police sources said.

The Jacksons’ grandmother, Georgia Jackson, 72, said at the scene that the two had gone to the restaurant to get food and see their mother.

After the shooting, their mother called Georgia Jackson to tell her that “They shot Dillon.”  By the time she arrived, Raheem Jackson had been found in a backyard.

“We got a call from their mama. She only said one at first, but when I got here they said they found the other.

“I just want them to pick him up … when they get him off the ground I’ll go with him,” Jackson said. “I didn’t have kids to lose ’em like this.”

The crowd after the shooting dwindled as the night wore on. So too the number of police bosses who had for a time gathered at 75th and Coles.

Evidence technicians, detectives and beat cops remained behind, guarding a scene that extended half a block out in each direction from the restaurant.

But the Jackson brothers’ mother remained. She blamed herself. She questioned her faith. She said she had nothing to live for, and that she planned to take her own life.

“I can’t go on, my life is over. I’m about to goddamn kill myself.  I was standing right here in the window, they killed ’em right in front of me.”

Her family consoled her. They hugged her. When she ducked under the tape to try and see her sons, the officers guided her gently away from lines of sight but kept her inside the crime scene.

She paced through ankle-deep water in a nursing home parking lot to get to a black iron fence, peering into the yard where Raheem’s body lay slumped against a tree. A relative nudged her away.

She settled in a space in the parking lot, inside the tape but near the officers, a space she called a “mutual zone” where she was about the same distance from each of her dead sons.

“I gotta stand with ’em both. I can’t leave. I gotta stay with both my sons ’til they get ’em up,” she said.

As evidence technicians worked in the yard behind the apartment building and took photos of Raheem’s body, his mother drifted toward the black iron fence. The officers and her relatives gave her space.

She stood alone in standing water, under a street lamp, and looked at her son.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-chicago-violence-shootings-20170330-story.html