CHICAGO _ Homicides are down in Chicago by about 25 percent compared to 2016 and 2017, years when the city was hit with its worst violence in about two decades, according to data kept by the Tribune.
The number of people shot in 2018 is down about 30 percent from the past two years. But as with homicides, shootings continue to outpace victims from 2012, 2013 and 2014, the Tribune figures show.
So far this year, 370 people have been shot and there have been at least 82 homicides. In 2016 at this time, at least 520 had been shot and there had been 109 homicides; in 2017, at least 540 shot and 108 homicides.
The toll from this past weekend was one person killed and nine others wounded, including three children injured in the same attack, according to authorities.
Arthur "AJ" Smith, 38, was fatally shot in a car in the Golden Gate neighborhood on the Far South Side early Sunday, according to police and family members.
Smith, who lived in Iowa, was visiting relatives in Chicago and was gunned down near the block where he grew up, according to Smith's father. Smith had moved from Chicago to get away from the violence.
"He called me the other day and said that he was coming and that he'd let me know when he got in town but evidently, he did not," said Smith's father, James Smith, 62, of the Morgan Park neighborhood.
In a West Side shooting Sunday, two 13-year-olds and a 14-year-old were wounded in the 4900 block of West Rice Street in the Austin neighborhood about 7:10 p.m., police said.
A 13-year-old girl suffered a wound to the upper leg and a 13-year-old boy was struck in the left ankle, police said. A 14-year-old girl was shot in the upper right thigh. All three were stabilized at Stroger Hospital.
In an attack on the South Side, a man was stabbed to death early Saturday, police said.
