Report: Slain teen was getting ready to move away

John Carpenter — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:08:50 -0500

DNA Info reports that slain teenager Miguel Cancel was preparing to relocate to Florida once he graduated high school. He planned to live with his grandmother and study computers at a community college. Read the report here.

High school senior shot to death day before daughter’s 2nd birthday

John Carpenter — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 09:42:36 -0500

Chicago Sun-Times; April 15, 2013

By Mitch Dudek

Miguel “Mikey” Cancel was going to give his daughter a little stroller to push her dolls around at her birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese on Sunday.

But the party was canceled after he was shot to death about 2:40 a.m. Saturday. He was in a car at a red light in the 4200 block of West Irving Park Road when a gunman approached and opened fire. Two other people in the car were wounded.

Police said the shooting may have gang ties, but Cancel’s grandmother, Mirna Resto, who raised Cancel, said the high school senior was weary of associating with gang members and excited about the prospects of graduating from high school and either joining the Army or attending college.

Resto said Cancel, 19, was headed home from a nightclub when the shooting occurred. She thinks it was a case of mistaken identity in which he may have unwittingly drawn the attention of gang members by wearing a hat with gang colors on it.

“I always tell him, ‘Mikey, don’t wear hats in the car. You know how these gang-bangers are.’ But he loves hats, he must have hundreds,” said Resto, who planned to move with her grandson to Florida in two months.

“I’m tired of these people in Chicago, they think everybody’s a gang-banger,” she said.

Cancel attended Amundsen High School in the Ravenswood neighborhood, where his grandmother, who recently retired, worked as a payroll clerk, but he transferred to Taft High Schoool in Norwood Park for his senior year. “He didn’t have problems at school, he just didn’t want to be there if I wasn’t there,” Resto said.

“He was excited about his prom,” she said. “Now everything is gone because someone wanted to play God with a gun.”

Cancel’s daughter, Katie, had a scaled-down second-birthday party at home.

“We sang happy birthday and had a cake, but she was looking for her father,” Resto said. “I don’t know what to tell her.”

“His life had completely changed because he had a daughter,” she said. “He’d see her on the weekends and go to the park with her. He was trying to be a good father. And now she’s left without a father.”

On Sunday, friends and former teachers stopped by the Jefferson Park home where Cancel lived with his grandmother to offer condolences.

“You can’t imagine the feeling of going to the morgue and having to identify your son,” she said. “He’s supposed to bury me. I’m not suppsoed to bury him.”

Teen shot, killed, on Northwest Side

John Carpenter — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 08:52:43 -0500

Sun-Times Media Wire; Monday, April 15, 2013

Miguel Cancel, 19, was shot and killed in the 4200 block of West Irving Park Road when a gunman opened fire on the car he and two others were travelling in early Saturday, authorities said.

He was pronounced dead at John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County at 9:05 a.m., the medical examiner’s office said. A 22-year-old man was shot in the left and right thighs and taken to Norwegian-American Hospital, and also transferred to Stroger, police said. A 19-year-old woman was shot in the right arm and taken to Norwegian-American Hospital in “stable” condition.

Miguel Cancel | Homicide Watch Chicago

Report: Slain teen was getting ready to move away

High school senior shot to death day before daughter’s 2nd birthday

Chicago Sun-Times; April 15, 2013

Teen shot, killed, on Northwest Side