By MITCHELL ARMENTROUT
Chicago Sun-Times Wire
Police investigate after two people were killed in a South Shore drive-by shooting late Thursday. | Mitchell Armentrout/Sun-Times
Two people shot to death Thursday night in the South Shore neighborhood, the sixth and seventh to be killed in 12 hours within an eight-block radius in the neighborhood, have been identified as Cornell M. Patrick and Dominique Victoria Scott.
Just after 11 p.m., the 27-year-old Patrick and 23-year-old Scott were riding in a gray van southbound on South Shore Drive when a black Jeep pulled alongside near 70th Street, according to police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
A shooter in the Jeep opened fire, hitting Scott in the side of the head as she sat in the front passenger seat. Patrick was shot in the side of his body in the backseat. The van crashed into a pole at 71st Street.
Patrick, of the South Deering neighborhood; and Scott, of Gary, Indiana, were both pronounced dead at the scene, according to the medical examiner’s office.
Angelique Burnett, who lives a few blocks west of the shooting scene, said her home surveillance system captured video of the van coasting into the pole near the Metra tracks after the shooting. Another person got out of the van and ran away, she said.
A few dozen family members and friends pulled up in separate cars and consoled each other in a strip mall parking lot north of the crime scene. A man retched over a curb between sobs that echoed down the empty block.
Police called for backup as relatives lost patience when authorities began removing the bodies from the van a few hours after the shooting.
“Why are you dragging him around like a dead dog?” a man shouted.
Another neighborhood resident, Kyra Carr, said she had just arrived home a few blocks north of the scene when she heard five gunshots before two police cruisers came speeding down South Shore Drive minutes later.
“You lose count of the shootings after a while,” she said. “But seven bodies in a day. Crazy. Something is wrong.”