Nov. 29--A woman stood at the corner of Garfield Boulevard and Union Avenue early Sunday morning and called 911.
Send an ambulance now, said LaTonya Taylor. Someone was shot hours ago, and he was still in the car.
"He got shot at 12:30," she said. Her voice was steady and deliberate. "I want to know why he's still sitting here."
Yes, she said, police were there already, at least 20 officers. But the person shot might be her son, and he was still in the crashed car. She listened for a moment and hung up.
"They said we need to talk to police," she said to nobody in particular.
Across Union Avenue, her sister Sabrina Taylor was screaming.
"If he's shot, we're gonna burn this motherf---er down," she yelled. "We want an ambulance! We want an ambulance right now! We want an ambulance!"
Maurice Jackson, 27, and his girlfriend had been shot two blocks north, in the 5300 block of South Union Avenue, about 12:20 a.m. Sunday in the city's Back of the Yards neighborhood. They were in a parked car when Jackson was shot in his side and the woman was grazed in the hip; he drove south on Union until he crashed into a tree on Garfield Boulevard's grassy median.
Jackson was dead on the scene. His body could be seen slumped back in the driver's seat until police shut the car's door. After family arrived, police drove onto the grass around the car, hiding it from view.
Sabrina Taylor led her sister into the street to get a closer look at the crime scene. A few other family members were there, too, and Sabrina Taylor kept screaming.
A police sergeant walked over and led them out of the street.
"Come over here, let's talk," he said.
He spoke with the family for a few moments, then LaTonya Taylor broke away from the group and began to stagger down the median.
"Why? Why? Why my baby?" she sobbed.
Maurice Jackson grew up on the block where he was shot, the Taylor sisters said. He had moved to Minneapolis three years ago; he was in town to visit for Thanksgiving and had planned to go back in a day or two.
He was a gentle man, his mother said; he found steady work and supported his three children.
"He loved his kids and he tried to be nice to everybody, and they shot him up," LaTonya Taylor said.
About 3:45 a.m., Jackson's body was covered with a blanket and removed from the scene. A detective brought his mother into his car to speak with her. Family members again began to get agitated, until Sabrina Taylor calmed them down.
"Let's keep the peace, (we're) not going to jail," she said.
Sabrina Taylor said her nephew wasn't a gangbanger.
"You know, there's players and there's squares, and he was one of the squares," she said.
If the police couldn't figure out who killed Jackson, she said, they would have to take things into their own hands.
"We ain't taking this lying down," she said.
