9-Year-Old Boy Fatally Shot In Chicago Yard

9-Year-Old Fatally Shot In Chicago Yard

A distraught family is looking for answers after a 9-year-old boy was fatally shot in the back yard of a Chicago apartment building Wednesday afternoon.

Antonio Smith was shot multiple times about 4 p.m. Wednesday behind a building a few blocks from his home in the city's Grand Crossing neighborhood, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. He was taken to an area hospital and pronounced dead about an hour after the shooting.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Antonio enjoyed dancing and playing football. He would have been starting his fourth-grade year this fall.

"He was just a child, just a baby, still had a whole life ahead of him. And why? Just a child," Antonio's cousin Kenya Eggleston told the Tribune. “When is it going to stop?"

Eggleston and other family members are now urging the boy's shooter to come forward and turn himself in.

"My baby, he was a good kid. He was a mama's boy," Antonio's mother Brandi Murray told ABC Chicago. "My boy, he was just an angel."

No arrests have been made as of Thursday afternoon, and police have released few additional details as their investigation continues.

Father Michael Pfleger of St. Sabina's Church in Chicago is offering a $5,000 award will be offered for information benefiting the case, the anti-violence activist announced Thursday.

In a Thursday interview with DNAinfo Chicago, Pfleger said he believed people should have the "same anger" as a result of the third grader's shooting death as they did in response to Michael Brown's killing in Ferguson, Missouri.

The Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood, located on Chicago's South Side, ranked sixth among the city's 77 community areas when it comes to the number of violent crimes reported per resident in the past month, according to the Tribune.

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