A 14-year-old girl was shot in the calf inside a home on Chicago's Northwest Side in the early hours of Monday. Police found her wounded after responding to a report of a person shot in the 3100 block of North Kolmar Avenue around 3 a.m.
Officers were called to the scene and discovered the teenager inside the home with a gunshot wound to her left calf, according to CBS News. She was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where she was listed in fair condition, as reported by the Chicago Sun-Times.
Conflicting Details on Location and Investigators
Exactly where in the city the shooting unfolded remains unclear from early reporting. The Sun-Times identified the home as being in Hermosa, while CBS News described the address as falling within Chicago's Belmont Gardens neighborhood. The two outlets also differ on which detectives caught the case — the Sun-Times reported that Area 5 detectives were investigating, while CBS News said Grand Central area detectives were handling the inquiry.
No further details were available as of Monday morning, and it remains unresolved how the shooting happened inside the home.
Part of a Grim Citywide Pattern
The Kolmar Avenue shooting adds to what has become a troubling running count for Chicago's youngest residents. In a report published May 19, 2021, ABC7 Chicago said 108 shooting victims in the city were children, and 16 of them had died. That same report noted a 15-year-old girl who was shot while walking her dog and was recovering at Comer Children's Hospital.
The pattern extends beyond Chicago's Northwest Side. In the South Deering neighborhood, crisis responders began handing out gun locks after a 4-year-old boy was shot inside a home, according to CBS Chicago.
Research Points to Neighborhood Disparities
A Northwestern Medicine study found that children living in very low-opportunity neighborhoods faced up to 20 times higher odds of being hospitalized for gun injuries compared with children in the most advantaged areas, according to Northwestern University. Researchers behind the study analyzed nearly 7,000 firearm injuries among children ages 0 to 17 in Florida, Maryland, New York and Wisconsin between 2016 and 2021.
The same research found that unintentional shootings accounted for roughly 57 to 63 percent of all pediatric firearm-injury hospitalizations across those four states during that span. Researchers pointed to safe firearm storage and firearm-safety education as strategies that could help prevent those unintentional injuries.
Gun safety advocates have separately said that more than 100 children across the country had been victims of unintentional shootings so far this year, per reporting from ABC7 Chicago. No arrests or charges connected to the Kolmar Avenue shooting had been announced as of Monday morning.
