By REEMA AMIN
Chicago Sun-Times Wire
Jose Hernandez was killed in the same block he lived just after midnight Friday in the South Side Back of the Yards neighborhood.
The 26-year-old Hernandez was sitting on a porch at 12:05 a.m. in the 4800 block of South Justine when another man walked up and shot him in the back, police and the medical examiner’s office said.
He was taken to Stroger Hospital, where he later died, police said.
An officer at the scene said the shooting—the second on that block in about nine hours—may have stemmed from a conflict involving the La Raza street gang.
Jocelyn Avila, 15, said she and her family had returned home 10 minutes before the shooting. She said relatives are in town for her upcoming Quinceañera, a 15th birthday party celebrated for girls in the Latino community.
“We were all in the kitchen you know, having bonding, family time, and this happens,” said Avila, who heard between four and six gunshots.
She and her cousin from Georgia, 14-year-old Aristeo Brito, had also heard the gunshots from the shooting at 3 p.m. Thursday, which they said happened across the street from Avila’s home. Police said a 31-year-old man was wounded.
“It was five rounds, like continuously,” Brito said of the earlier shooting, who said he’d never heard anything like it.
Jose Perez, 30, lives right where the first shooting happened but was at work at the time. Relatives told him the victim, who they didn’t know, ran into his house after getting shot to get help.
Avila said the shootings have gotten worse on her block in the past year. She wants more cops to patrol her neighborhood but said she thinks it gets ignored “because it’s on the South Side.”
“When there’s little kids hanging out…especially because the (water) pump is right there and they open the pump during the summer,” she said. “Imagine a shooting.”