CHICAGO—Chicago police say five people were shot, and four of them killed at an apartment building on the city’s Northwest Side. One woman was taken to hospital in a critical condition but died on Sunday, Oct.13.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports the shooting happened around 5:30 p.m. Saturday. First Deputy Superintendent Anthony Riccio says a 67-year-old man with a history of issues with his neighbors is in custody.
Riccio says the man first went into an apartment and shot and killed three men and a woman as they ate dinner. The man then went to a separate unit in the building and shot another woman. Police say that victim was taken to the hospital in critical condition. She has since died. All the victims were adults.
A weapon was recovered. Riccio says the man had a history of complaints from other residents, but investigators “don’t know what set him off.”
Today’s mass shooting at a condo building on W. Irving Park is devastating and almost unfathomable, except it is happening way too frequently—not only here, but across our country.
— Mayor Lori Lightfoot (@chicagosmayor) October 13, 2019
Mayor Lori Lightfoot called the shooting “devastating.”
The Cook County medical examiner’s office identified one of the four victims killed Saturday as Tsvetanka Kostadinova.
The woman who initially survived but died on Sunday was 53-year-old Jolanta Topolska.
An investigation is ongoing.
Facts About Crime in the United States
Violent crime in the United States has fallen sharply over the past 25 years, according to both the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) and the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) (pdf).
The rate of violent crimes fell by 49 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the FBI’s UCR, which only reflects crimes reported to the police.
The violent crime rate dropped by 74 percent between 1993 and 2017, according to the BJS’s NCVS, which takes into account both crimes that have been reported to the police and those that have not.
The FBI recently released preliminary data for 2018. According to the Preliminary Semiannual Uniform Crime Report, January to June 2018, violent crime rates in the United States dropped by 4.3 percent compared to the same six-month period in 2017.
While the overall rate of violent crime has seen a steady downward drop since its peak in the 1990s, there have been several upticks that bucked the trend. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate increased by more than 20 percent, to 5.4 per 100,000 residents, from 4.4, according to an Epoch Times analysis of FBI data. The last two-year period that the rate soared so quickly was between 1966 and 1968.
The Epoch Times reporter Jack Phillips contributed to this report.
