A seven-year-old girl has died following a shooting in Chicago at the weekend that also injured her six-year-old sister, who is “fighting for her life”.
Brian McDermott, Chicago's police chief of patrol, told reporters on Sunday evening that the sisters were inside of a parked vehicle when someone opened fire.
The seven-year-old, who was identified as Serenity Broughton by Chicago’s medical examiner’s office, was shot in the chest and torso and taken to Loyola University Medical Centre, where she was later pronounced dead on Sunday.
Her sister, who was named as Aubrey, was struck in the chest and right armpit and was "fighting for her life" at the hospital on Sunday night, Mr McDermott said.
He added that the area where the shooting occurred – in the Belmont Central neighbourhood of Chicago, and northwest of downtown – was a "gang conflict area”.
There is no indication that the sisters or their mother were targeted on Sunday.
It followed another weekend of violence in Chicago, with 55 individuals wounded in shootings, along with five deaths, from Friday to Monday, according to the Chicago Tribune .
“Like a machine gun going off, like, you know what I mean, like two people shooting at each other or something," said a Chicago resident who heard the shooting, in an interview with ABC7.
The grandmother of the sisters, Regina Broughton, added that she was “lost”, and Serenity and Aubrey "were my life, my everything”.
"How do you prepare yourself for something like this? She was a beautiful child. Her spirit was beautiful, innocent, everything about her was innocent,” said Ms Broughton.
The shootings come amid efforts to curb rising gun violence in the city and around the US, with more than 200 children shoot in Chicago alone this year, according to ABC7.
Lori Lightfoot, the city’s mayor, said in a statement that “we must declare war on these killers and their associates, and we must support our police as they leave no stone unturned”.
She added that the death of Serenity was “senseless and brutal”.
Additional reporting by The Associated Press.
