July 19--Charzelle Maurice Hayes celebrated his 25th birthday Wednesday with a barbecue block party almost exactly where he was shot and killed early Saturday morning.
On Saturday afternoon, about 12 hours after the shooting that claimed Hayes' life, his friends gathered by a makeshift wooden table on the 3500 block of Grenshaw in the Homan Square neighborhood on Chicago's West Side. A police officer sat in his cruiser nearby; a police barricade blocked off half the street on the west end.
John Smith, 45, sat on a folding chair in the shade of a tree near where Hayes was gunned down. A family friend, Smith said Hayes was "a good guy" who liked to barbecue and help others on the block.
"I got the phone call and when I got over here they were taking him away," Smith said, shaking his head. "It's a peaceful block. See that table over there? All we do is play dominoes and spades."
Hayes' death punctuated a violent night on the block, near the Homan Square police facility. He was fatally shot and an 18-year-old man was wounded at about 1 a.m. when a light-colored van pulled up and someone inside it fired, according to police authorities. Hayes was hit in the chest and arm; he was later pronounced dead at Mount Sinai Hospital.
At around the same time, police officers fired shots at a fleeing gunman on the 1100 block of South St. Louis, on the west end of the 3500 block of Grenshaw. No one was hit, according to police. And at about 5 a.m., there was another shooting on the 1100 block of South Central Park Avenue, on the east end of that same block of Grenshaw. A 25-year-old man and a 60-year-old woman were both shot and wounded.
On Saturday evening, a Chicago Police Department spokesman said no one was in custody in connection with Hayes' death and that the shootings were being investigated as separate incidents.
But family and friends on Saturday said they believed the shootings to be related.
"You can put two and two together," said Kimberly Scott, Hayes' mother, who was grieving with family members a couple blocks north on Flournoy street.
In the partial shade on the sidewalk, Hayes' family hugged one another and wept. Scott held Charzelle Jr., 9, and Charielle, 5, two of Hayes' four children. Hayes was also father to a 2- and a 4-year-old.
Scott remembered her son as a loving father. He was athletic and funny, she said. He rapped under the rap name "The Mayor" and also enjoyed playing basketball.
Scott leaned forward in her chair, her grief turning momentarily to anger.
"I want him back and I can't get him back, can I?" Scott said. "Because the police aren't doing their jobs and they're not getting the guns out of these kids' hands."
"I'm not going to rest until they get the person who killed my son," the mother said, leaning back again.
Tatiana Hayes, Hayes' sister, wiped away tears as she remembered her big brother, who she considered to be a protector and a father figure. She said she believed her brother was indeed the target of the shooting and that he had been "set up."
In 2011, Hayes had been sentenced to three years in prison on felony drug charges. In 2013, he was charged with felony possession of a firearm and aggravated unlawful use of a weapon, but was found not guilty of those charges in March.
More recently, Hayes had been trying to stay out of trouble, his sister said, and had started believing in God.
"All the good outweighed the bad," said Tatiana Hayes, 22. "He was turning his life around."
gtrotter@tribpub.com
