By Jeremy Gorner
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy told reporters Sunday that a 7-year-old boy fatally shot on the West Side during the July Fourth holiday was “the unintended victim of a bullet meant for his father.”
Antonio Brown, who police say is a ranking member of the Four Corner Hustlers street gang, has been arrested 45 times on charges ranging from gun possession to burglary, and is not cooperating with detectives in their investigation into the slaying of his son, Amari Brown, police said.
McCarthy said that the elder Brown’s last arrest was in April for gun possession after leading police on a vehicle pursuit. Brown was later released on bail in that case, Cook County court records show.
“If Mr. Brown is in custody, his son is alive,” McCarthy, flanked by several police officials and other officers, told a room full of reporters at the Harrison District police station on the West Side on Sunday afternoon. “That’s not the case. Quite frankly, he shouldn’t have been on the street.”
McCarthy offered no evidence that would prove Antonio Brown had been the intended target in the shooting that killed Amari.
Amari Brown was among nine people fatally shot throughout the city since Thursday afternoon. Forty-six others were wounded by gunfire.
Most of the shootings over the holiday weekend happened from 9:20 p.m. Saturday until 4:45 a.m. Sunday, when 30 people were shot across Chicago. Three of those victims died, including 7-year-old Amari.
McCarthy expressed anger and frustration at the boy’s death and the sudden uptick in gunplay overnight, a burst of violence that persisted despite the department this weekend extending the shifts of thousands of officers from 8 1/2; hours to 12 hours.
McCarthy said that the outbreak in violence shows that the number of officers working the streets isn’t as critical in preventing shootings as having effective gun laws that put gun offenders behind bars for a long time. McCarthy has long contended that Illinois’ sentencing laws for gun crimes are too lenient.
“If you think that putting more cops on the street would make a difference, then take a look at the fact that we put a third more manpower on the street for this weekend,” McCarthy said. “What’s the result? We’re getting more guns. Well, that’s great. It’s not stopping the violence.
“And it’s not going to stop the violence until criminals are held accountable and something is done to stem the flow of these guns into our city.”
In discussing the death of 7-year-old Amari, McCarthy called the boy “the unintended victim of a bullet that was meant for his father” who has had “numerous and frequent encounters with the police.”
McCarthy also held up a bundle of paper to show reporters as he spoke at a podium. He said it was Antonio Brown’s arrest history.
“Quite frankly, I’ve never seen anything like this,” McCarthy said. “I don’t know how many pages it is. It’s probably about 22 pages long.”
Earlier Sunday, Antonio Brown told the Tribune that he thought the shots that killed his son were just fireworks. But then people started yelling, “They shot your son,” and he saw Amari collapsed on the ground, he said.
He and a friend drove Amari to Stroger Hospital after the shooting, the elder Brown said.
“I picked him up and put him in the car. I was in the back seat, I was talking to him the whole time. I was like, ‘You cool, I know you cool,’ ” Brown said.
“Yeah, I’m cool. I’m cool,” Amari answered, according to Brown.
But despite the doctors’ efforts to save Amari during surgery, he was pronounced dead at the hospital shortly before 2 a.m.
McCarthy said detectives have been talking to witnesses and chasing leads, but he declined to share what they were. Bullet casings were found down the block from where Amari and a surviving victim, a 26-year-old woman, were shot in the 1100 block of North Harding Avenue in the Humboldt Park neighborhood shortly before midnight.
But police have also said that bullet casings were found around where Amari and the woman were shot, creating the possibility that someone had returned fire.
McCarthy, meanwhile, told reporters about how angry and frustrated he was to talk about another senseless murder, equating Amari’s death with other high-profile slayings in Chicago over the past few years.
“Pick out the names,” he said. “Hadiya Pendleton. Jonylah Watkins. The list goes on and on. This has got to stop.”
Copyright 2015 the Chicago Tribune