A Chicago police officer shot a 22-year-old man in the elbow during a foot pursuit in the South Side's Gresham neighborhood Monday night, police and residents said.
About 9:30 p.m., police responded to a call of a man with a gun in the 1300 block of West 76th Street, Fraternal Order of Police spokesman Pat Camden said. When officers arrived on the scene, they spotted a group of people standing on a corner, he said.
A man standing in the group began running, and uniformed police officers gave chase into a fenced area bordered by nearby row homes, Camden said.
During the chase, the man turned toward police with a gun his hand and an officer fired in self-defense, Camden said.
The man was taken to Holy Cross Hospital in good condition, Camden said. Police found a semiautomatic handgun at the scene, he said.
After learning of the shooting, the man's mother went to the hospital, the scene and two police stations hoping to learn what had happened, she said.
As of early this morning, Lavita Jones, 38, still had few answers.
"They're still not giving me no information about my child, period," she said. "I haven't heard anything but [that] the police shot him."
Near the scene of the shooting, residents questioned whether the shooting was justified.
Standing in a backyard near the corner of 76th and South Loomis Boulevard, Brenyatta Taylor said the area inside the row homes was poorly lit.
"You can't even see anybody," Taylor said. "How are you going to shoot when can't even see who you're shooting?"
Whatever the circumstances of the shooting, it was likely to increase hostility between neighborhood residents and the police, 63-year-old Walter Collins said.
Collins, an Englewood resident visiting his mother nearby about the time of the shooting, said the violence in both his neighborhood and his mother's saddened him.
"This is not a time of peace," Collins said. "This city that we live in is like a war zone."
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