A 7-year-old girl is among the eight wounded by gun violence, one of them fatally, Thursday evening into early Friday in Chicago.
NBC Chicago reports that the 7-year-old girl was struck in the thigh by a stray bullet around 7:10 p.m. in the 13200 block of South St. Lawrence Avenue in the city's Far South Side Golden Gate neighborhood.
According to NBC, two men were in an altercation nearby and when one of them fired a gun, he missed his intended target, striking the girl instead. The girl, according to CBS Chicago, was hospitalized in good condition and is recovering.
Around the same time in the evening, three men inside a sport utility vehicle were shot in the 600 block of West 115th Street in the city's Far South Side Roseland neighborhood, the Chicago Tribune reports. One of the men -- Lamont Coleman, 29 -- died after he was shot in the back and leg. The other two men injured in the shooting are both 30-years-old.
Earlier in the evening in a separate incident, a 7-year-old boy was shot in the leg in the 6100 block of South Maplewood Avenue and taken in critical condition to Oak Lawn's Advocate Christ Medical Center around 5 p.m., according to CBS. An 18-year-old man the boy was with was also shot in the leg.
The Tribune has listed the other Chicago shootings reported overnight Thursday into Friday.
The Thursday evening gun violence followed on the heels of another youth shooting incident earlier in the day. Tonishia Allen, 24, and her 1-year-old daughter Jaliyah were shot while sleeping in their South Side home. Police are currently investigating that incident, but don't yet have any suspects. Allen was treated and discharged from an area hospital while Jaliyah's condition has stabilized.
According to Chicago Police Department data, both homicides and nonfatal shootings have spiked in the city over the first three months of the year when compared with the same time period last year. Homicides have increased 60 percent through April 1 in Chicago.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel on Thursday defended the steps the city has taken to fight crime on his watch, including gang audits and shifting some 600 police officers from desk duty to the streets. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Emanuel said:
"You can say, are you doing it right? [But] the question is, why were those policies not done before? Why was it the police department was not organized to have a gang audit to do pro-active efforts to intervene on reprisal shootings that are driving the numbers? We're doing that."
WATCH a report on the mother and her 1-year-old daughter shot early Thursday in Chicago: