Assault-style rifle used in Chicago shooting

Associated Press

CHICAGO

Those behind a late-night attack at a southwest Chicago park in which 13 people were wounded, including a 3-year-old, used an assault-style weapon to spray the crowd with bullets, making it “a miracle” no one was killed, the city’s police superintendent said Friday.

Ballistics evidence shows that those behind Thursday night’s attack used a 7.62 mm rifle fed by a high-capacity magazine, police Superintendent Garry McCarthy told reporters. That type of weapon, he said, belongs on a “battlefield, not on the street or a corner or a park in the Back of the Yards,” the neighborhood where the shooting took place.

“It’s a miracle in this instance that there have been no fatalities based upon the lethality of the weapon used at the scene,” McCarthy said, calling on lawmakers to restrict the sale of such weapons and choke off the flow of illegal guns into the city.

The attack happened shortly after 10 p.m. while the Cornell Square Park was still crowded with people watching a basketball game and enjoying a warm, late-summer night.

Investigators believe several people took part in the attack but weren’t sure yet how many fired shots. McCarthy said that based on witness interviews, it appears the attack was gang-related and that several victims are gang members.

“Even if it’s gang-related, even if we have the most hardened criminals who becomes the victim of gun violence, that individual is the father, brother, sister sometimes parent of somebody else,” McCarthy said. “So murder is not a one-victim crime.”

Among those shot was a 3-year-old boy, Deonta Howard, and two teenagers, a 15-year-old and a 17-year-old.

Deonta was alert when he arrived at the hospital and apparently was doing well, his family and friends said early Friday. He was in critical condition, as were two other shooting victims. The others reportedly were in serious or fair condition.

“Senseless and brazen acts of violence have no place in Chicago and betray all that we stand for,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said in a statement Friday.