A fifth person has died from wounds suffered in a shooting at an apartment building on Chicago’s Northwest Side.
Police say a 67-year-old man went into a neighbor’s apartment on the evening of Oct. 12, fatally shooting four people as they ate dinner.
They say the suspect then went to a unit on the floor above and shot another woman, who died of her injuries Sunday.
The suspected gunman has not yet been identified or charged as of Sunday afternoon. He was taken into custody shortly after the shooting.
First Deputy Supt. Antony Riccio says the man had a history of issues with his neighbors but investigators “don’t know what set him off.”
Riccio says it’s not clear how the suspect was able to enter the apartments but there was no sign of forced entry.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot called the shooting “devastating.”
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
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.
A weapon was recovered and the investigation is ongoing.
US Murders Drop Most Since 1990s
Not since 1999 has the United States seen the number of murders drop so precipitously as in 2018, when 1,080 fewer people died of homicide or non-negligent manslaughter than the year before, according to national crime statistics released by the FBI on Sept. 30.
The murder rate dropped to 5 per 100,000 residents, a decline of 6.8 percent from 2017.
Overall, the violent crime rate dropped by 3.9 percent, most notably the robbery rate, which slid by 12.6 percent in 2018. The property crime rate, meanwhile, decreased by 6.9 percent. The burglary rate, in particular, declined by 12.5 percent.
Of the seven crimes captured in the data—homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft, and car theft—only rape was up in 2018, by 2.1 percent.
The decline in crimes accelerated from 2017, when the violent crime rate dropped by about 1 percent and the rate of property crime fell by 3.6 percent.
The past two years saw a decrease from the major crime spike in the two years prior. Between 2014 and 2016, the murder rate had increased by more than 20 percent. The country hadn’t seen a two-year increase so steep for decades.
Epoch Times reporter Petr Svab contributed to this report.
