CHICAGO STRUGGLES TO SOLVE MURDERS

As the number of killings in the city has risen dramatically, police struggle to solve the crimes as few witnesses come forward

By Shibani Mahtani | The Wall Street Journal | October 31, 2016

CHICAGO—Michael Lucas, a 61-year-old retired welder, was on his sister’s porch when two
masked assailants shoved his 3-year-old grandnephew out of the way, fired a hail of bullets and
fled.

Brian Yarbrough, 19 years old, was killed in a gunfight with a rival gang member.

The two murders—13 years and a few blocks apart on the two deadliest days in 2016 and 2003
—offer a window into the changing nature of Chicago’s violent crime and the decline in the
ability to solve it, as the city grapples with a dramatic rise in the number of murders here.
Mr. Lucas was among nine people killed Aug. 8 this year. After nearly three months, police have
been stymied in solving all nine murders that day. Not one arrest has been made, nor one suspect
brought in for questioning.

Most of the victims, including 22-year-old Ireal Mitchell and Anthony Hatchett, 44, were
standing on street corners when assailants quickly appeared, fired bullets and fled in cars,
according to police reports.

Thirteen years earlier, on a tree-lined street of small, single-family homes a few blocks from
where Mr. Lucas was killed, Mr. Yarbrough became one of 10 people killed in a single day over
the Fourth of July weekend.

After the gunfight, Mr. Yarbrough was dragged outside with eight gunshot wounds and left to
bleed to death.

Multiple witnesses to his murder came forward offering information to detectives. One even
captured the shooting on a cellphone camera and handed it over to police, according to a family
member.

Jerry Dean, then 31, who was also hit multiple times in the shootout, was arrested for the murder
just days after but argued self-defense and wasn’t charged.

Including Mr. Dean, police arrested suspects in seven of the 10 murders on July 5, 2003—
including a husband who confessed to stabbing his wife, two brothers who robbed a taxi driver
and shot her to death and a teenager who stabbed her ex-boyfriend in self-defense—police
records show.

Suspects in four of the cases were apprehended on the day of the murder itself.

By contrast, case reports from this year show that police have scant information on most of the
offenders and little knowledge of how the murders came to be.

The first to witness Mr. Lucas’s murder was his grandnephew, C.J., who ran into the house
screaming “Uncle Mike is in the blood—the firecrackers got him.”

“The individuals we are dealing with today are heartless people; they don’t care about the age of
their victim, the gender, nor the place they are shooting at,” said Richard Wooten, a former police officer who patrolled the South Side neighborhood where Mr. Lucas and Mr. Yarbrough were killed