Chicago gun violence: Reward offered after 5-month-old girl fatally shot in car

A 5-month-old girl was fatally shot while in the rear of a car in a neighbourhood on Chicago’s South Side.

The infant, who was identified as Cecilia Thomas, was struck in the head on Friday evening when shots were fired from another vehicle in the South Shore neighbourhood, according to police and the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Cecilia was taken to a hospital where she later died.

A 41-year-old man in another vehicle was in good condition at a hospital after suffering a gunshot wound near his eye, Chicago police said.

No arrests have been made, and authorities have provided no details on what led to the shooting or how it happened. Police said that they did not have any updates.

The baby is among the youngest victims of gun violence in Chicago. She would have turned 6 months old in four days, according to Natalia Derevyanny, a spokeswoman for the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.

As of June 19, the Chicago Police Department had recorded 282 homicides so far this year, down from the 316 recorded during the same period in 2021. Like many other cities in the US, Chicago reported a dramatic increase in homicides last year. The 797 homicides in the nation’s third-largest city in 2021 — Chicago’s highest toll for any year in a quarter-century — eclipsed Los Angeles’ tally by 400 and the total in New York by nearly 300.

Crisis responder Andrew Holmes, who spoke with Cecilia’s mother, expressed anger at the shooter, saying, “you shouldn’t sleep at night” and urged the person to turn themselves in.

“You just took this baby’s life. This baby was an infant, this baby didn’t do anything to you,” he said.

Activist Ja’Mal Green is offering a $7,900 reward for information about the shooting.