Sept. 17--A 17-year-old boy was shot dead as he answered a knock on the door of his family's home in the Calumet Heights neighborhood on the South Side on Wednesday, according to relatives and police.
The teen, identified by his family as Armonni Nelson, was shot several times in the abdomen around 7:45 a.m. and collapsed in the hallway of the home in the 9100 block of South Yates Boulevard, according to Officer Ana Pacheco, a Chicago police spokeswoman. He was pronounced dead at the scene, Pacheco said.
"I thought somebody dropped something in the kitchen because Nelson slept in the back bedroom," said his grandmother Alice Johnson, 66. "When I got to see him laying in a pool of blood, his brother was trying to tell him, 'Wake up! Wake up!' "
His older brother, D.J. Nelson, said he woke to four or five gunshots and saw his brother "run from the back to the front and he collapsed."
Relatives sobbed on the porch of a neighbor's home.
Johnson said Armonni Nelson was an honor roll student in high school but dropped out because he was afraid to go to school and was taking online courses.
Family members say Nelson enjoyed music and aspired to be a rapper. He recorded under the name Faizon and recently made his first music video, they said.
Nelson's grandfather John Coleman drove to the family's house from south suburban Dolton.
"How can you hate like that?" he said as he watched detectives and evidence technicians. "Can a young person really hate that much? I don't even fool with young people in these streets unless they family."
