Aug. 23--Jesus Jimenez, 19, had just walked inside his family's Southwest Side apartment after his mother drove him home from work when someone fired gunshots outside his window.
A family was having a party about a block away, so Jimenez dismissed the loud pops as fireworks.
But screams and police sirens that followed moments later made Jimenez and his siblings come outside to find a chaotic scene on the 4000 block of South Albany Avenue in the Brighton Park neighborhood.
A 35-year-old man lay on the ground bleeding in the middle of South Albany Avenue near its intersection with West 40th Place.
Jimenez's mother stood next to the man, trying to keep him conscious by talking to him.
She said she had been walking home around 9:30 p.m. Saturday after parking her car when she saw a man cross Albany several feet ahead of her. Then someone fired three gunshots, and the man dropped to the ground.
Jimenez's mother went down to the ground next to a fire hydrant on the northwestern corner of the intersection.
"I saw him get shot," said Jimenez's mother, who declined to give her name. "He didn't even finish crossing the street."
After she hit the ground, she said she heard someone nearby yell, "I got shot! I got shot!"
Once she was sure the shots had stopped, Jimenez's mother walked over to the man in the street.
"I told him: 'Talk to me. Talk to me,' " she said. "But he wasn't even saying nothing."
She talked in a shaky voice as she sat with her four children and neighbors on the steps of her home, nervously recounting the shooting that happened about an hour earlier.
In front of her, police officers cordoned off the intersection of 40th and Albany with yellow and red crime tape. Two to three shell casings lay in the middle of the intersection.
Detectives shone flashlights on a pool of blood that covered a white crossing stripe on the asphalt in the middle of the intersection -- the place where the 35-year-old man was lying before he was picked up by an ambulance.
Police said officers responded to the 4000 block of South Albany Avenue on a call of a person shot in the area and found the man lying in the street with gunshot wounds to the upper right chest and arm.
The man was taken in critical condition to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead, police said.
Nearby, a bullet grazed the right thigh of a 26-year-old woman who was on the porch of her home when the shooting happened. She was treated at the scene, police said.
As of early Sunday morning , no one was in custody as a result of the shooting.
Jesus Jimenez said he had lived in Brighton Park for the past two years, since part of his family moved there from far north suburban Round Lake after his mother was laid off from her job.
He said the area seemed quiet to him overall. But he said he hopes to move back one day to Round Lake, where he grew up.
"The city is so different," Jimenez said as he watched police officers investigate the shooting. Blinking blue police lights illuminated his face.
Across from Jimenez's home, another family sat on the steps of their two-story home, also watching the crime scene.
Two boys and two girls, ages 10 and 11, stood on the sidewalk next to the yellow crime tape, about 20 feet away from the pool of blood in the middle of the street.
"It was loud," said one of the girls, who was watching TV when gunfire erupted.
"It gets, like, scary sometimes," added one of the boys, hugging himself with his arms.
The children's parents motioned to them to get out of the sidewalk and come closer to them. They obeyed, running over to the porch, behind a black-railed metal fence.
Some went inside the home, but some sat down on the steps and continued to watch police officers and detectives process the crime scene in front of them.
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