Young mother killed in Englewood mass shooting that left 4 dead, 4 injured: ‘She was supposed to graduate today’
Markeytia Richmond knew exactly which house to go to when she woke up Tuesday morning and heard that her 19-year-old cousin may be dead.
Her cousin, Shermetria Williams, had met a man less than two months ago when she attended one of his house parties. She started calling him “her man” and regularly attended parties at his house, but Richmond said she didn’t like that her cousin was always out with someone older.
Richmond began picking Williams up from his house often and tried to convince Williams to hang out with her instead. So Tuesday morning when her family was trying to find Williams, Richmond knew where to lead them.
“I knew where to come,” she said. “She was with him a lot.”
It was inside that two-story white stone house in the 6200 block of South Morgan Street where Williams, according to family members, was one of at least four shot dead and four others injured. The man she was seeing is believed to be among those shot.
Richmond said her family was told that there was an argument and at least one person started shooting, first at a window then turned the gun to the people.
Williams had a 2-year-old daughter, Richmond said. Her father, Demetrius Williams, said Shermetria was his younger of two daughters. The family had tickets to go to her graduation from Country Club Hills Tech & Trade Center scheduled for the day she died.
“She was supposed to graduate today,” he said. “I want whoever is responsible to be held accountable. … I don’t know anything. I was just told my daughter is no longer here.”
Eight people were shot Tuesday morning at a gathering in the home in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood on the South Side, with at least two of the wounded in critical condition, according to police.
Officers were called to the home at 5:45 a.m. for a report of multiple people shot, said Chicago police Superintendent David Brown, at a news conference at the Englewood District Station.
Of the four people found dead at the scene, three were women, according to Brown. Four others were taken to hospitals, with two in critical condition and two whose conditions had stabilized Tuesday evening, according to police.
Authorities later said a 2-year-old girl was taken to a hospital for evaluation “out of an abundance of caution” but that she had not been injured. She was inside the home when the gunfire began, Brown said.
At least one of the victims likely lived at the home, Brown said. He did not say which victim or whether they were among the injured or killed.
One of those killed was identified by the Cook County medical examiner’s office as Ratanya Aryiel Rogers, 28. The medical examiner’s office had not released the names of the others late Tuesday afternoon, pending notification of their families, but police said they were a 35-year-old man, a 32-year-old woman and another woman whose age was unknown.
Of those known to be wounded:
A woman in her 20s was in critical condition at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
A man, 23, arrived at St. Bernard Hospital with a gunshot wound to the back. He was transferred to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he had been listed in critical condition.
A 41-year-old man had been shot in the back of the head and was at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, and his condition had stabilized.
A man, 25, was shot in the back of the head and was at the University of Chicago Medical Center, and his condition had also stabilized.
There had been a gathering at the home when an argument began and shots were fired, police said. Brown also said there have been previous reports of parties being held at the location.
A witness told police they heard gunshots about 2 a.m. and ShotSpotter, the city’s gunfire detection system, captured the sounds of gunfire outside the home, Brown said. It wasn’t clear whether officers responded to the home at that time. When more gunfire rang out about 5:30 a.m., officers responded and found the victims, Brown said.
Hours later, yellow and red police tape remained visible, strung across Morgan Street at 63rd, about a block away from where the shooting took place.
Reporters and neighbors stood near the tape as evidence technicians began their work at the location. People watched from their yards or porches as the technicians worked.
One woman wearing a yellow shirt walked under the tape and became hysterical. Two officers walked over to her and tried to reassure her before street activist Andrew Holmes and others came up to calm her. Others watched as she screamed out, “That’s my baby. Oh, God. ... Where’s my baby?”
Sheron Jackson, 59, said two of her daughters, 37 and 32, had been at the gathering but left around 11:30 p.m. before the shooting occurred. A group often meets at the house to hang out on the porch and smoke marijuana, she said.
Her daughters had a friend who they left at the gathering; they had been trying to find out if that friend was among those shot.
“I’m glad (my daughters) weren’t in there, but my heart goes out to the ones who didn’t make it,” Jackson said.
Jackson, who has lived in the neighborhood for 40 years, said she had been sleeping when the shooting happened, but she awoke to the sound of a helicopter above her home.
“Our people are getting killed. Our babies getting killed,” she said. “And for what?”
After police took down the tape just after 1 p.m., 42-year-old Michelle Bolton came out of her home across from where the shooting occurred and said she had just stopped crying. She knew the man who lived there and had talked to him the day before. She only moved to the neighborhood two months ago.
“I can’t believe this happened. He’s a good person,” she said. “I don’t understand what happened. … I could’ve been over there. Dead.”
Ald. Stephanie Coleman, 16th, also responded to the scene. This is just the beginning of summer, she said.
“What needs to happen? Prayer. … Shootings like this happen because of disinvestment, because of trauma,” she said “Today, we have failed.”
Outside the University of Chicago Medical Center, Clifton Lawrence, 45, said he was about to go to work when he learned from family about his daughter, who is in her 20s, getting shot and that the incident had been on the news.
He said he’s heard a couple of different stories about the shooting, including that his daughter may have been trying to pick someone up from the home on Morgan, but he was trying to sort out all the details. He said his daughter is also the mother of a 3-year-old girl.
In a calm, but frustrated tone, Lawrence lamented how the violence in Chicago has become repetitive.
“They don’t have respect for the elders. I don’t think they value life no more. … They’re shooting kids,” Lawrence said. “It’s got to come to an end.”
He said his daughter had been working at a seafood restaurant for about two or three months and “was on the right path.” But he acknowledged that young women like his daughter can be vulnerable depending on where they choose to spend time.
“You can’t go anywhere because the city’s messed up,” Lawrence said.
One of the other victims, a 23-year-old man, was recovering at an area hospital from his injuries Tuesday afternoon, according to his brother, 18. The brother, along with an older man and a woman, told the Tribune at a family apartment that the 23-year-old is expected to survive.
The 18-year-old said his brother has a daughter who is about 6.
The 18-year-old, the older man and the woman at the apartment deferred further questions to his mother, who was not there Tuesday afternoon.
Tuesday morning’s mass shooting is at least the third on the South Side in less than two weeks. Saturday morning, 10 people were shot, one fatally, near 75th Street and Prairie Avenue in the Chatham neighborhood. And on June 6, eight people were wounded in a shooting at a graduation party at 89th Street and Cottage Grove Avenue in the Burnside neighborhood.
Englewood, where Tuesday’s shooting occurred, falls within one of the city’s police districts that typically has the most shootings and homicides each year. Through Sunday, the district had 20 homicides, five fewer than the same period in 2020, Chicago police statistics show. But there were 129 total shootings — events in which at least one person was wounded or killed — compared with 111 last year, a 16% increase, the Police Department’s statistics through Sunday show.
Along with police, violence prevention organizations also launched a full response, immediately sending workers to the hospital and out to blocks near the shooting, said Autry Phillips, who is executive director of Target Area Development Corp.
“We’ve been spread out since this morning,” Phillips said by phone. “We’re looking, listening and talking.”
At an unrelated news conference, Mayor Lori Lightfoot called the shooting “a tragedy that’s ripped apart families and inflicted intense trauma on several individuals.”
Lightfoot is under intense pressure to curb city violence, which has spiked in the past year and a half. The mayor often has blamed the surge in violent crime on the pandemic and its ripple effects, such as the court system being largely closed in that time, but others question the city’s strategies and leadership.
The mayor said she spoke with several of her counterparts across the country regarding this weekend’s mass shooting in Austin, Texas, and she made a renewed plea for gun control, an argument she makes frequently — as did her predecessors Mayors Rahm Emanuel and Richard M. Daley.
“It tells us that we still have much work to do in our mission to end gun violence here in Chicago and, in particular, to limit the access of individuals to illegal guns,” Lightfoot said.
Despite that, Lightfoot characterized the city as safe.
Asked whether the spike in violence will hurt Chicago’s reopening, Lightfoot said some areas of the city have “challenges,” but not all. Tuesday’s mass shooting happened in a house, not on the street, she said, citing preliminary information.
Lightfoot also said she fundamentally disagrees with a recent analysis by the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, headed by Kim Foxx, that the Police Department “is arresting the wrong people who possess guns.”
“We are a city that’s awash in illegal guns,” Lightfoot said. “Those illegal guns cause deep pain and injury and death so the suggestion that somehow the Police Department is wasting its time arresting people who illegally possess firearms at the height of this crisis, I just fundamentally disagree with that.”
She was likely referencing last week’s presentation by Foxx’s office on gun crime data that included a section meant to debunk what it said was the “myth” that more policing is needed to reduce shootings. Brown made similar comments that seemed to indicate he believes Foxx’s office would like to decriminalize possession of illegal weapons.
“It’s ridiculous to think that we can decriminalize illegal possession of guns and be safer,” he said. “Why would anyone argue that illegal gun possession needs to be decriminalized? How could you sleep at night?”
Matthew Saniie, chief data officer for the state’s attorney’s office, analyzed graphs on gun arrests in Cook County, including one that he said showed Chicago police arresting more people for a gun crime than the number of shootings in Chicago. Another graph purportedly proved a large driver of that increase was what he deemed “nonviolent” gun arrests of those without prior convictions, while what he termed “violent” arrests by Chicago police have dipped.
“It’s not necessarily a question of arresting people; it’s a question of arresting the right people,” Saniie said.
Of those arrested without prior convictions, he added that “it’s very unlikely that a lot of these individuals that are getting arrested are involved in actual gun violence.”
In his news conference, Brown also said a high-capacity magazine had been used in Tuesday’s shooting, which meant the shooter was “able to do more harm to more people.” He made many of the same points as Lightfoot regarding illegal weapons, although no weapons had been recovered Tuesday so it was too soon to know whether the weapon used had been obtained illegally.
“What that tells us about the larger discussion about illegal guns is there’s way too many guns in the wrong hands in this city and the country,” he said.
Brown became particularly impassioned talking about illegal guns, saying, “common sense is not so common,” and challenged the logic of those who believe that illegal weapons make the city a safer place, calling the notion “ridiculous.” He said the addition of illegal weapons makes nearly every situation inherently more dangerous, including road rage cases and incidents of domestic violence when there is a gun in the home.
“We should all know that illegal gun possession makes us less safe, not more safe. And I would argue the idea of decriminalizing illegal gun possession is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard in my nearly 40 years in law enforcement, particularly at a time when our country is seeing the most increase in violent crime in decades,” he said.
“I would ask those that argue that point to come to Englewood, come to this address on Morgan Street, and look these victims and their families in the eye and make the argument that illegal gun possession makes you safer and didn’t cause our grief this morning (or) the pain of these families,” Brown said.
Editor’s note: This story was edited June 16, 2021, at 8 p.m. to correct the spelling of Shermetria Williams’ first name.
Chicago Tribune’s Gregory Pratt, Alice Yin, Annie Sweeney and Sarah Freishtat contributed.
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