CHICAGO _ A white sheet covered the man's face and part of his body, but his legs stuck out, his feet pointing toward the night sky.
He and another man, 36, were both shot around 10:50 p.m. Thursday in the 2000 block of East 67th Street, just east of Jeffery Avenue.
Police said officers found each on the sidewalk. The younger man was shot in the back and taken to University of Chicago Medical Center, where he was in serious condition. The 39-year-old man had been shot in the head, and was pronounced dead on scene.
He rested on his back on the north sidewalk of 67th Street, near an entrance to the Chicago Park District's Jackson Playground.
His girlfriend walked up to the yellow tape skirting the crime scene and asked what was going on. Neighbors told her someone had been killed. A knowing expression washed over her face, but she didn't know, yet.
She spoke with officers, then a police sergeant.
"It's him for real?" she asked. Then she broke down.
She was mad and upset and she needed to tell people what happened and she needed to charge her phone, she said. Someone brought her a phone charger, but she didn't have numbers for all his family.
She left to find them, making a U-turn and driving away west on 67th. When she went back, she was alone. Then his uncle came. He tried to comfort and hold her, as did neighbors and police. At times she let them, but she was never still for long, pacing and crying in the street.
"You took my whole heart away," the woman sobbed. "You took my whole heart. I don't even know what I'm going to do... He got too much to lose."
The man, who went by "Swerve," had two young children, a boy and a girl, around the same age as neighbor Phats Collins' children, Collins said. Since Collins moved into the neighborhood about four years ago, he'd become used to seeing the man at the park, where their children would all play. The man pushed his children on the swings and nudged them down the slide, and seemed like a doting father, Collins said.
"He was just a father, a regular guy, gone too soon," Collins said.
Passersby filtered through the neighborhood, stopping to watch the investigation or gawk at the body. Neighbors said the men were cousins or like cousins. One man who paused at the scene said he'd moved in from Gresham about a month ago. "I thought I was getting away from this," he said.
Another neighbor, who lingered outside the yellow tape talking to Collins, said he was in an alley nearby off Jeffery when he heard six pops. People had been setting off fireworks earlier in the day, and he didn't think anything of it. But when he heard sirens, he figured those six may have been gunshots.
About four minutes after he heard them, he walked over to the street, and noticed the man's body. No one appeared to have been helping him, and no one else came to his side until medics arrived, the neighbor said. It seemed like the man had died quickly, he said.
When one of the officers went to move a squad car at the west end of the scene, it wouldn't start. A freelance news videographer who always carries cables, Mike Kowal, gave it a jump, driving his blue Jeep underneath the tape to bring it within range of the police SUV.
A large white van came a little after 2:15 a.m. to take the body to the morgue.
Around 2:40 a.m., fire department Engine 65 arrived to wash the blood away. Illuminated by streetlights, streams of water splashed onto the sidewalk, bright white against the dark sky.
