At least seven people -- including two youths, aged 12 and 14 -- were fatally shot over the weekend in Chicago while the NATO summit and the protests it attracted dominated the city's news cycle.
Nazia Banks, 12, was playing with friends outside of his home on the city's South Side just after 10 p.m. Saturday when two individuals emerged from a gangway next to the home and shot him in the head, the Chicago Tribune reports.
Nazia died at the scene of the shooting.
Alejandro Jaime, 14, was another youth victim of gun violence over the weekend in Chicago. According to the Tribune, Jaime, of the 2900 block of West Pershing Road in the city's Brighton Park neighborhood, was fatally shot while he and a friend were riding their bikes Friday evening.
Jaime's teacher, Concepcion Calderon, told the Tribune that the boy was very well-liked -- "I don't think there was one person in this school who didn't like him. It was just his smile."
A few hours after Jaime was fatally shot, five were shot -- one fatally -- outside a birthday party in the 11600 block of South Peoria Avenue on the city's Far South Side early Saturday. ABC Chicago reported that a shooter walked up to the group of five as they sat on a porch at 2:28 a.m.
Melvin Jacobs, 23, was taken to Advocate Trinity Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 5 a.m. Saturday, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.
Early Monday, two men -- Alejandro Munoz, 26, and Estaban Alvaraz, 27 -- were fatally shot while they were sitting on the front steps of a home in the 2200 block of South Leavitt in the city's Pilsen neighborhood around 12:40 a.m., WLS reports. The Sun-Times reports that police believe the shooting was gang-related.
According to WLS, two others -- Joseph Owens, 25, and Dwayne Billingsley, 35 -- were killed by gun violence over the weekend in Chicago. At least 22 others were wounded in shootings citywide.
Time magazine pointed out the irony of what they called "a different and far more familiar chaos" of gun violence that played out in the city while the NATO drama played out.
Despite an initiative by the Chicago Police Department to up police resources in some of the city's most violent districts, homicides in the city have soared -- the city's murder rate is up 53 percent and shootings are up almost 20 percent in the first four months of 2012, though overall crime is down.
In a Mother's Day rally earlier this month, more than 50 Chicago women who previously lost children to violence rallied against the city's high crime rate. Over that weekend, shootings and other violent crimes killed five -- including two teenage males -- and wounded nearly 20 people citywide.
Photo by Michael Melchiorre via Flickr.