Dec. 11--Mario Vega was unloading food from an old school bus for the pantry at New Life Community Church when someone a few yards away fired three gunshots toward a 20-year-old man.
Vega dropped. When the gunfire subsided, he ran toward a man who was screaming. He had been shot under a broken city of Chicago pod camera and lay bleeding from his arm and abdomen on a metal step of a corner store at 27th Street and Lawndale Avenue.
It was about 11:15 a.m. School was in session across the street at Little Village Academy.
Vega said he emptied his pockets, took off his black puffy vest and used it to apply pressure to the man's arm, which was bleeding profusely with smoke still coming from the entry wound.
"He kept screaming where he was shot at," Vega said. "He said he was shot in the stomach, so I opened up his hoodie and looked for where the gunshot might have been. It was on the right side, just barely grazed him, which is a good thing, didn't look like it hit anything. It just basically touched him on the right side. It was more on the forearm where he was bleeding from."
Paramedics took the man to Mount Sinai Hospital in critical condition, police said. Police said the shooting likely was motivated by an ongoing gang conflict between two gangs with deep ties to the neighborhood.
Vega left his keys in his vest, which traveled with the young man in the ambulance. When Vega went to the hospital looking for his keys and saw paramedics washing blood from the back of the ambulance, they told him the man would likely survive.
"They were just kind of cleaning the utensils and some of the other stuff ... all the way from the ambulance to the entrance to the hospital was just little droplets of blood, a blood trail going in."
At about 2:40 a.m. Friday, another man was wounded in a Southwest Side shooting.
The man, 27, was in a van in the 3300 block of South Pulaski Road when someone fired shots from a white SUV, said Officer Hector Alfaro, a police spokesman.
He went to Mount Sinai Hospital with a gunshot wound to the abdomen. His condition was stabilized.
Deanese Williams-Harris and Megan Crepeau contributed.
