Aug. 06--Shot in the back and the chest, Paul King collapsed and died Thursday morning next to a car parked on a block of homes in Morgan Park where tricycles and basketball hoops sit on overgrown lawns.
Around the corner, almost in sight, was where King's 7-year-old son, Elijah, had been seriously wounded back in May.
Casondra Dace, Elijah's mother, stood near King's body and smoked as she wondered how to break the news to her son and her other children.
"How am I going to tell them this?" she repeated over and over.
Be direct, her friend Kimberly Swift said. "You have to sit them down and tell them, 'Your daddy gone.'"
Should she take the children to see the body before the funeral, Dace wondered.
No, Swift said, and don't wake them up in the middle of the night to tell them.
Police say that, after King and a friend stepped out of a house in the 1300 block of West 108th Place around 1:20 a.m., a man emerged from nearby bushes and started shooting. Investigators recovered about half a dozen shell casings at the scene.
King was 51 and was a neighborhood barber who would cut children's hair for free if he knew their families couldn't pay, according to Swift and several other people who showed up at the crime scene in their pajamas.
More than anything, he loved his kids, they said.
"If he (wasn't) walking around to get them candy, he was walking them to school," said Swift, who knew King for 13 years. "That's all I've seen him do, is take care of his kids."
Someone walked up and asked Swift what was going on.
"Baby, the devil is alive and here on this earth," Swift said. "I don't know if people believe it, but this is hell on earth."
Dace hunched her shoulders and held her elbows as she stared at King's body covered by a white sheet.
"He was a good person. Very good person," Dace said. "This is so f---ing stupid."
Swift worried that King's death so soon after her son's shooting would take its toll on Dace.
"This is really a hard pill for her to swallow right now," she said.
Dace's son Elijah had been walking home from Shoop Academy of Math, Science and Technology, where he was a first-grader, around 3:20 p.m. May 20 when two gunmen jumped from an alley in the 10900 block of South Loomis Street, police said.
They yelled, "What you be about?" and fired at least six times, police said.
"I turn around and look back and there was this boy with, like, a face mask on -- his hood tied -- and as I look back, I saw the gun pointing," Elijah's older brother said at the time. "I ask my brother was he OK? He say yeah. Five seconds later, I noticed a hole in his jacket."
The boy suffered a wound to his right shoulder.
