Chicago Shootings 2017: 12 Shot In 13 Hours, Three Fatally

The new year brought no relief from gun-related violence to Chicago: Two teenagers were shot to death on the city's West Side, among 12 people shot within 13 hours Tuesday. One of the other victims was a 65-year-old woman.

Malik McNeese, 16, and a 17-year-old whose name has yet to be released, were fatally shot by a gunman in a passing vehicle around noon Tuesday as they were walking on the sidewalk to the 17-year-old’s home.

Police dispatched to the scene of the shooting in the East Garfield Park neighborhood, roughly 5 miles west of the Chicago Loop, found one of the boys dead. The other died shortly after being brought to a local hospital.

McNeese lived about two blocks from where the shooting occurred.

Lillie Turner, 65, was shot in the leg by stray bullets from the same gunfire that killed the two boys. Her daughter, Franchester Wilkerson, said she could hear the sound of screeching tires preceding the shooting. Turner was inside her home, tying her shoes, when a number of bullets burst through a window.

After hearing the two boys had died in front of her house, Turner, who had moved into her home recently, told the Chicago Tribune she was “grateful to be alive.”

Authorities said the two teens were shot by someone driving a black SUV.

"In the past year there's been so much shooting, it's pathetic," a 51-year-old man who lives across the street told the Tribune. The man, who did not wish to be identified, said he was lying in his bed when he heard roughly seven gunshots. When he got out of his house to see what was going on, he said he saw the two boys shot and lying on the ground.

Simmison McGruder, 23, was killed in Garfield Park Tuesday night following a shooting around 11:15 p.m. Officers responding to calls about shots being heard in the area discovered the bodies of two men lying on the street. McGruder was shot in the head and the left arm while the other man suffered multiple gunshot wounds. Both men were rushed to a local hospital where McGruder was pronounced dead. The other was hospitalized in critical condition.

Twenty-eight people were shot in Chicago on the first day of 2017, the first of which just five minutes into the new year, according to reports Tuesday. Among those shot were five women and three minors.

President-elect Donald Trump took to Twitter Monday and alluded to the fact that the city experienced 4,300 shootings in 2016 and 762 homicides. Trump said if Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel couldn’t curb the city's murder rate in 2017, he would allocate federal resources to aid local police forces.