Shoot Out

On July, 24, Lakeisha told me this story. She was so calm in relaying it, that I figured it was some distant memory. I was, of course, shocked to hear that it had taken place only a week earlier, on Thursday, July 17.

Ok, well, me and my friends and my cousins, we were all outside of my grandmother's building. And we was laughing at my little nephew; he was eleven months old, and he was just dancing, so everybody was just laughing at him. And so our house is like in the middle of between a alley and then a church.

And so, some guy just walks from the alley and then he like jumps, so everybody looking like, "Who is this?" So, my cousin says, "Who is that?"

And so he said that it was a shoot out, and he just start shooting everywhere. So he pulls out the first gun first, and he just started shooting. Then he pulled out the second gun and just kept shooting, and I guess he shot his self in the leg, and like at the bottom of his leg too. In the leg and the thigh. And he shot my cousin four times in the leg, and grazed him two times.

So, Everybody just start running and everything. So I... when I ran upstairs, I looked, and I tried to see if like if anybody was dead outside with my grandma's window, and nobody wasn't dead, but I did see him in the alley still like on his knees.

And so, we ran back down the stairs, and then when the police came, they was like... What did they say? They said, "Where is he at?" So we pointed to where he was. And then, after we pointed to where he was, what happened? Oh, they found him. And then they asked us was this him, and stuff like that. And my little sister, she said, "Yeah." And I couldn't see him cause his face... I didn't see him the first time. Then when they turned his face, I saw that it was him.

So my little sister went into the ambulance truck, and they was like, "Is this him?"

And he was like, "I told you it wasn't me," like saying like he was with us, standing outside, and he was automatically just got shot, you know. But my little sister was like, "Yeah. That is him."

Erin: What happened with the case?

They dropped it, I guess. I think they dropped it.

Erin: You said that cousin couldn't testify?

Right, cause he was in so much pain. So they said they was going to throw it out.

In Alton, this story would have been front page news. It would have been on three television stations in four counties. But I'm not in Alton; I'm in Chicago, Illinois, where this story is casually told, a week after the fact, over lunch in the break room.