Who gets killed in Chicago — a Watchdogs special report

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Chicago Sun Times:

on the West Side pulled over a black Chevrolet whose driver, they said, hadn’t signaled a turn.

 

The driver, DeMorrow Stephens, didn’t have a license, according to the police. And when they asked his passenger, Marcus Patrick, why he smelled like marijuana, they said he pulled seven baggies of it from his waistband.

 

The two men, both felons, were members of the Four Corner Hustlers street gang, according to police, who arrested them for having contact with another gang member while on parole. Each spent two days in jail before going back to their neighborhood, Austin.

 

Within a year, both were gunned down in separate shootings — victims of the surge in violence that claimed 324 lives in Chicago in the first six months of 2016 and put a national spotlight on the city.

 

Like Stephens, 26, and Patrick, 22, most of the dead were young, African-American men who were shot to death, according to a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of every murder in the city from Jan. 1 through June 30. They typically lived and died in neighborhoods crippled by poverty and flooded with drugs and guns — places where gang conflict and street stops by the police are a daily fact of life.

 

And, like the two friends, most already were in trouble with the police or caught up in violence long before they were killed.