The woman was told her son had died, but no one was allowed to see his body. So she stood outside the emergency room and prayed aloud.
“Please God, I want his chest to feel a heartbeat,” she pleaded.
The woman and over a dozen others, several of them kids, were at Comer Children’s Hospital on Saturday night, embracing each other and waiting for updates from officers after learning that the woman’s son was fatally shot in the West Englewood neighborhood.
The 15-year-old, identified by the Cook County medical examiner’s office as Austin Rogers, was hit by gunfire about 8:10 p.m. while standing with a group of people outside in the 2300 block of West 68th Street, according to Chicago police. Someone ran up and fired at him before jumping into a vehicle that sped away.
Authorities said the teen was taken to Comer’s with a gunshot wound in his upper back and pronounced dead about half an hour later. His home address was listed in the 6700 block of South Bell, a short walk from the site of the shooting. No arrests have been made.
Austin’s mother said she would give anything to switch fates with her son, who was a freshman at Simeon Career Academy High School in the Chatham neighborhood. He had days left before the school year concluded.
“He was a beautiful baby and a good kid,” she said. “And he did not deserve what happened to him. I love him more than I love my own life.”
At the crime scene, shell casings glinted near a puddle at the mouth of an alley on 68th Street between Oakley and Bell avenues. Yellow tape hanging from light poles and trees blocked off the chunk of the street closest to the alley. Officers pointed flashlights at the back of houses and fences inside the alley, at one point huddling near recycling bins to look at the ground nearby.
One officer intermittently waved his flashlight at drivers on Oakley, signaling at them to avoid 68th Street. The driver of a black sedan turned right anyway and parked next to the crime scene. Calmly, he exited the vehicle and asked the officer where the boy shot was taken, where the attack happened, and who did it.
The officer only had the answer to the first question. The man thanked him and drove away.
Just one woman was outside Comer’s about 9:30 p.m., pacing around underneath a milky layer of fog that had sunk over the city. While weeping to someone on the phone, she rubbed her temples with her left hand and gasped, “He didn’t do anything. Why, why, why?”
Others soon arrived and sprinted over to her, each one wrapping her in a hug until she was fully concealed. Her sobs began to escalate, and a man said, “Calm down.” Another female’s voice repeated, “He not gone.”
A young girl, wide-eyed and standing no taller than the adults’ hips, had also come with them. The woman who was crying quickly dried her tears and picked the child up. Together, they went into the waiting room while the rest of the crowd continued to grieve outside.
“They took my cousin,” a female, who appeared to be in her teens, shouted. “He ain’t do nothing to those guys. He was a baby and they took him. Why did they do this? Why?”
About half an hour later, a detective left the emergency room to speak with the family members, some of whom took down his contact information. A female security guard at the hospital also came out to hand a small black object to Austin’s mother, who clasped it to her chest amid tears.
She did not want to stay long after that. “Come on. Let’s go. Let’s get out of here,” she declared while beckoning at the people indoors to join her.
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They heeded her, filing out of the waiting room and delivering their last embraces before going home. “You’re going to drive your sister’s car because she can’t drive,” one woman told a boy, who nodded.
“He’s one of my babies, and they won’t let me see him,” Austin’s mother said. “It’s like they killing me all over.”
