Baby in a Stroller Hit by Car After Drive-By Shooting of a Rapper

In yet another tragic killing of an innocent bystander in Chicago, a speeding car involved in a drive-by shooting careened onto a sidewalk and ran down a baby boy in a stroller before the eyes of his horrified mother and sisters on Saturday afternoon.

A witness said the car rolled right over Dillan Harris in his stroller at about 2 p.m. on the city’s South Side in Woodlawn. The shooting — which took the life of a rapper — happened about three miles away just 20 minutes earlier.

“Baby wasn’t even crying,” Micah Ocana told the Chicago Tribune. “Just a lot of blood.”

After crushing the stroller, the car kept going and crashed into an empty lot, according to ABC Chicago, then several people in the car jumped out and ran.

“The mother was in the middle of the street just devastated,” witness Erin Fletcher told ABC Chicago.

The 1-year-old Harris was taken from the 6300 block of South Ellis Avenue to University of Chicago Comer Children’s Hospital where he was pronounced dead, according to Chicago Police. His anguished mother escaped physical injury.

Police believe shots were fired from that car at a man standing in the 7700 block of South Kingston Avenue, the Tribune reports, striking him the hip and back. He later died at a local hospital. The man shot dead in the street has been identified by BET.com and allhiphop.com as the rapper known as Capo, a 22-year-old associate of the notorious Chicago rapper Chief Keef. Capo’s given name is Marvin Carr. A video of him bleeding out on the sidewalk was posted to YouTube.

The Chicago Sun-Times reports that “multiple offenders” are now in police custody after the child’s death and the shooting. Police reportedly have two people in custody and are searching for a third as of Saturday night.

Dillan, his mother and his two sisters were waiting for a bus to go to the beach with relatives, according to the Sun-Times.

“It happened in the blink of an eye,” she said. “When I looked up, they were just there. I tried my best to save my baby.”

Boy Shot on Fourth of July Mourned

As the horror unfolded for this family, hundreds of people gathered Saturday at a funeral home to mourn another child, a 7-year-old boy shot to death on the Fourth of July. Amari Brown was outside watching the fireworks in the night sky with his father in their Humboldt Park neighborhood last Saturday when someone drove by and shot him in the chest.

The boy’s death shocked and saddened a city and brought national attention to Chicago’s inability to stop the gunfire and death on its streets. The murderous violence occurs so often in the nation’s third largest city, the Chicago Sun-Times dedicates a running tally to the human suffering in its feature Homicide Watch.

The Chicago Police Department mobilized its entire force and put nearly a third more officers on the streets than usual for the holiday weekend. Mayor Rahm Emanuel emphasized the tactical plan would “secure every part of the city” to ensure a ”family-friendly weekend” both downtown and in the neighborhoods.

And still, seven people were shot to death and 48 more wounded. Little Amari Brown was one of those dead, and you can count a woman standing nearby who took a bullet in the same drive-by among those wounded.

In the week after, police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, frustrated and angry, said the shots were intended for the boy’s father, Antonio Brown, a high-ranking member of the Four Corner Hustlers gang and a prolific drug dealer with a long rap sheet of almost four dozen arrests.

McCarthy also blamed the father not only for failing to help the police find the killers but for helping to perpetuate the cycle of gun-related violence that plagues some city neighborhoods. Brown himself had just been sprung from jail after his arrest on firearms charges, including aggravated unlawful use of a weapon, being an armed habitual criminal and felony possession of a firearm.

Crime and No Punishment

Why do the armed and dangerous believe they can open fire with impunity in the city of Chicago and reckless disregard for the innocents around them? A recent DNAInfo Chicago analysis of 2012 police data shows that 94 percent of the time, Chicago’s gunmen get away with it. And those who do get arrested on firearms charges rarely stay in jail.

“We need to repair a broken system,” McCarthy told reporters the day after Amari Brown was killed. “Criminals don’t feel the repercussions of the justice system.”

So far, no one has been arrested in his death.

At his funeral Saturday, his grammar-school friends wore green Teen-Age Mutant Ninja Turtle t-shirts and other mourners wore costumes in honor of the dead boy’s favorite cartoon heroes. Congressman Danny Davis and U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk eulogized the child, who was laid out in a white suit, in a white casket, surrounded by flowers, footballs and Ninja Turtle balloons.

His principal at Leif Ericson Elementary School was there and spoke to the Sun-Times.

“I hope we all learn from this,” Leavelle Abram said. “This is the first time I’ve lost a kid in grammar school.”

Next week, the city will see another funeral made possible by the city’s relentless neighborhood warfare, this one for a baby called “Dill Pickle” by his family.

The killing doesn’t stop. The innocents caught in the crossfire just get younger.