The gun violence in Chicago continues to strike a little close to home for the Obama family. First, a young women named Hadiya Pendleton, who had just performed in the inaugural parade, was killed by stray gunfire in a Chicago park. That prompted Michelle to attend her funeral and invite the parents to sit with her at the State of the Union speech. It also influenced the president’s decision to travel to Chicago to deliver a speech on gun violence. One of the young women who attended that speech lost her older sister later that same day.
A Chicago teenager was shot and killed just hours after her sister sat on a stage behind Barack Obama, listening to the president appeal for tighter gun controls.
Janay McFarlane, 18, died from a gunshot would to the head following an incident shortly before midnight on Friday, Lake County coroner Thomas Rudd told the Chicago Sun-Times…
…Among those listening to the address at Hyde Park Career Academy was McFarlane’s 14-year-old sister. Just hours later she would be mourning the death of her sister.
McFarlane’s mother, Angela Blakely, said Sunday: “I really feel like somebody cut a part of my heart out.”
Blakely said the bullet that killed McFarlane was meant for a friend. McFarlane was supposed to graduate from an alternative school this spring, her mother said, and wanted to go into the culinary arts.
“I’m just really, truly just trying to process it, knowing that I’m not taking my baby home any more,” Blakely said.
Meanwhile, the violence continues unabated in Killadelphia.
I wonder if AG wants to come around and argue that this Paul family isn’t a wee bit racist.
what racism, BooMan?
from the man who says that the Civil Rights Act was wrong
Lake County is north suburbs. That’s a ways from Hyde Park on the Southside.
The proximity was the sister being in attendance at the speech.
So Waukegan violence is being conflated with Chicago city violence now.
There were a number of shootings in Chicago on that day. But the Lake County story is a journalistic stretch just to have a turn of phrase. The sister might as well have been killed in Albuquerque. How many relatives of people who attended the rally were killed by gunshots outside of Illinois?
Most gunshot killings are not random. They are relational or geographical in a more specific way than occurring in the wider Chicagoland area. The article failed to illuminate the issues but went for the cheap turn of phrase.
Yeah, very right. Lake Ct is far from Chi-town. Most of it is very rural – farms, small towns. My mom grew up on a farm there. I have no idea why a Lake Ct coroner is commenting on a Chicago kid’s death. It’s like a Cooperstown coroner discussing a death in NYC.
Hmm. Killing was in North Chicago. Must be part of Lake Ct. Not sure about where that is.
North Chicago is north of the northern affluent suburbs and just south of Waukegan. It’s where Great Lakes Naval Base is. Not at all contiguous to Chicago, despite the name.
Probably close to Gurnee, where my dad grew up. Like many parts of the northern suburbs, these are now much less desirable places to live. Many suburbs have now seen the export of problems formerly found in cities.
When I see a local crime report, the first thing I look for is how close the incidents are to the places I frequent. I want to know whether I need to be on special alert, whether I need to park my car somewhere else, and how to assess my odds of becoming a victim with my current routine. I look for confirmation that I’m avoiding the areas that I need to avoid, or at worst, being especially alert when I can’t avoid them. Other than that, I don’t think there’s anything I can do. I don’t know exactly why I’m saying this now, except that I’m inclined to be brutally honest at the moment.
I have been on tour since February 7, and it has really moved up my plans to get the hell out of Killadelphia. I am not looking forward, AT ALL, to returning to that benighted place.
Who do you play with? Where are you touring?
right now, I’m playing with Woody Pines. It’s a lot of fun.
We’ve been in Florida all week. I’m writing from Orlando, and we head off to St. Augustine for three days later this afternoon.
I haven’t been on tour since my son was born, and had forgotten how wonderful it is to completely unstick yourself from ordinary life and become a gypsy. Philadelphia is not bringing me any closer to anything I want to achieve in life, and that goes beyond music. Looking to L.A., Nashville, and other places where creatives can make a good and fulfilling life.
I spend a good deal of my free time traveling, in many cases to foreign countries. I don’t usually stay in upscale, touristy places because I don’t think you get a good sense of a country and its people that way. I’ve had a lot of friends ask if I’ve ever felt unsafe traveling this way, and I tell them that I really never have (though obviously one has to use some common sense and be aware of the surroundings / situation). Now I’ve started adding that I feel safer in most other countries than I do in many places in this one. It’s sad, but it’s the truth.
I played this game from when I was in middle school to half-way through college. In that time, I met a lot of people. In particular, one guy was in the Israeli army. He said he was terrified to travel to the US.