This time the bloodshed that indelibly stains Chicago violated this city’s first chartered hospital, a haven and healer that’s given life for 166 years.
More likely will be learned in coming days about the why of this mass shooting on a Monday. For now, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s characterization will suffice: What took the lives of innocents at Mercy Hospital — one of them a Chicago police officer — is the face and the consequence of evil.
A single killing is as tragic for one family as a weekend of double-digit deaths is for many other families. But when the violence punctures the sanctity of a hospital, Chicagoans should be especially hurt and outraged.
Sadly, there is recent, if imprecise, precedent for Monday’s gunfire, where health workers keep patients — and hope — alive: On a Sunday morning in May, Chicago paramedics were treating a patient in their ambulance at 68th Street and Damen Avenue when they heard a fusillade. One bullet — perhaps a stray round — slammed into the ambulance but didn’t strike anyone.
A few weeks earlier, two women were wounded in a drive-by shooting outside Mount Sinai Hospital’s emergency room; paradoxically, they were part of a group visiting a patient who was shot earlier that day.
Monday’s shooting began outside Mercy, when a man confronted his girlfriend, possibly because of a broken engagement. The man shot the woman several times and then, as she lay on the ground, continued firing.
Next, the shooter apparently entered the hospital, where he shot one police officer in the lobby and fired at one or more others. The mortally wounded officer was identified as Samuel Jimenez, who had been on the force since early 2017.
As in the ambulance and Mount Sinai cases, some of Monday’s witnesses already were familiar with guns and violence.
One man said he recognized the shooter’s weapon as a 9 mm handgun. Another witness, able to estimate the number of rounds in a cartridge, compared Monday’s carnage to other incidents.
“I’ve heard shootings,” said the man, Hector Avitia. “I’ve known people that have died in the neighborhood like that.”
A third witness, Erix Horton, said hospital employees had the presence of mind to recognize that an “active shooter” situation meant they needed to hide in a locked room.
“A lot was going through my mind,” Horton said. “Make it home to see my wife and my kids.”
Dismaying situations, yes, but Chicago can’t let itself turn oblivious or accepting.
What occurred Monday is a horror like so many other horrors here. Each of them should make the residents and officials in Chicago redouble their efforts to find causes and cures.
The Mercy Hospital community will be a long time healing. Monday night, though, the lights of its windows were little beacons over Chicago’s South Side.
There were patients to treat.
There were lives to save.
— Chicago Tribune
