BY JESSICA KOSCIELNIAK AND EMILY BROSIOUS
Homicide Watch Chicago
Damian Williams was on his way to dinner when he was shot dead last Thursday in the Austin neighborhood, his brother said.
“He had just left like 10 minutes before,” said Williams’ older brother, James Williams. “It all happened so fast. All I can remember is just running down and seeing him laying right there — but I knew he was gone.”
Authorities said Damian Williams, 22, was standing with two men in the 5700 block of West Augusta Boulevard when somebody inside a tan Lincoln MKZ opened fire about 8:55 p.m. June 12.
Damian Williams, of the 5900 block of West Augusta Boulevard, was struck multiple times in the chest and died at Mount Sinai Hospital less than an hour later, authorities said. Another man, 23, was shot in the chest and groin and hospitalized in critical condition, police said.
James Williams described his brother as someone who saw what was going on in the streets and he chose to go a “totally different route.”
“He didn’t want jail. He didn’t want the police coming around him,” James Williams said. “He didn’t want it.”
“He said drug dealing was not an option for him,” James Williams said.
Instead, Damian Williams recently took a job working at a Jewel warehouse to support his 1-year-old son, his brother said said.
“The way he was there for his baby, like, if there was a ‘Father-of-the-Year’ award, he had it,” James Williams said.
“That’s why it hurts so bad right now. I thought when you do good, good supposed to happen.”
Damian Williams / Photo from Facebook
Prior to the shooting, James Williams, 23, had recently returned to the Austin community after spending a year in Kansas trying to “get his life together.” He said he wants to say in the neighborhood, but knows he can’t after his brother’s death.
“I can’t walk down the street or go to the store down there, knowing that my little brother was murdered there on the street,” James Williams said.
He doesn’t know why someone would kill his brother and thinks the murder must have been a case of mistaken identity.
Nobody has been charged for the murder. Area North detectives are investigating.