Children Become Collateral Damage on City Streets

Mary Mitchell writes in The Chicago Sun-Times on the death of a 9 year old girl in Chicago.  Her father was the intended target and she has to pay for his sins with her life.  This is heartbreaking and shameful.  It happens every day and no one seems to care.

I didn’t believe for a minute that a van full of masked shooters randomly picked the house where 9-year-old Chastity Turner was fatally shot last Wednesday. Because adults are hustling drugs and getting into disputes over drugs, children like Chastity are getting killed. And that’s the word on the street — that Chastity was caught in the crossfire between the young and old factions of the same gang. According to police sources, Chastity’s father, Andre Turner, 31, was the intended target of the shooting. Turner, who has multiple drug arrests and an illegal weapons conviction, was wounded along with two others. But he has not been charged with any crime in connection with his daughter’s death. Still, the house in the 7400 block of South Stewart where he lives and where his daughter was killed has been the source of complaints from community activists. “For two or three days leading up to the fatal shooting, there was an eruption of gunfire in and around that block,” said a local resident.

Mitchell concludes by giving her own verdict:

The only way to stop the wanton violence is to stop the drug trafficking that is driving it. Chastity didn’t deserve what happened to her. She was an innocent third-grader who was caught in a cross-fire. But there’s no point in pretending as if the adults who are at the center of this tragedy are innocent as well.

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