A 12-year-old girl doing homework on her front porch on Chicago's Southwest Side was shot in the leg Wednesday evening.
Crystal Booker, an eighth grader at Claremont Academy, a Track E school that began classes this week, was sitting in front of her family's Marquette Park home at about 6:30 p.m. when 10 shots were fired at a nearby home by a man in his late teens or early 20s, the Chicago Tribune reports.
"She was sitting out here doing homework, minding her business, being a kid," Crystal's cousin, Jasmin Booker, told WGN-TV. (See video above.)
Police say the bullet struck Booker in her right leg, and she was taken to Holy Cross Hospital in good condition, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.
No arrests have been made in the shooting as of early Thursday.
Gun violence has plagued Chicago for years, but in recent months the number of incidents has grown. Chicago's murder rate is also currently quadruple that of New York and double Los Angeles'. Since 2001, more than twice as many Chicagoans have been killed by gunfire than the number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan during that same period, a distinction noted this week by Gawker.
Chicago magazine's Whet Moser responded to the Gawker piece noting, among other things, how racial segregation and concentrated poverty impact the city's rates of violent crime.
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