A 38-year-old man was shot multiple times in Chicago's Chatham neighborhood Wednesday afternoon, left in critical condition after being struck in the arm, leg and torso in an alley near the 8100 block of South Drexel Avenue. The shooting happened around 4:40 p.m., and the man was rushed to Trinity Hospital, according to Chicago police.
No one is in custody, and the investigation remains ongoing, the Chicago Sun-Times reports. Police have not released details on a suspect, motive or weapon in the case, and the victim's condition beyond the initial critical report has not been made public.
A Familiar Block for Gun Violence
The 8000 block of South Drexel Avenue has seen trouble before. A 24-year-old man was shot in the hand during an attempted robbery in an alley on that same block earlier this year, when, per WGN-TV, the thief fired a shot, striking the victim in the hand. That incident is not known to be connected to Wednesday's shooting.
Chatham has logged a string of shootings throughout 2026. In June, a 20-year-old man was fatally wounded in a drive-by shooting in the neighborhood that also injured two other people, the station notes in its coverage. Two months later, in August, a 31-year-old man was critically wounded after being shot in the 8000 block of South Ingleside Avenue and taken to the University of Chicago Hospital in critical condition, with police saying that investigation, too, was ongoing.
The violence has a longer history in state data: an Illinois report ranked Chatham 15th among Chicago’s 77 community areas for fatal and nonfatal shooting victims from 2016 through 2020, counting 428 victims and a rate of 138 per 10,000 residents. The figures provide historical context for this year’s incidents, but do not show whether shootings in Chatham have risen or fallen since 2020. The state’s firearm-violence report includes the community-area ranking.
More Victims, More Unanswered Questions
Other recent Chatham incidents point to the same pattern of multiple victims and no immediate resolution. Police were separately investigating a triple shooting involving a teenager on the South Side, according to ABC7 Chicago. In another case, two people were left in critical condition after an overnight shooting in the 7900 block of South Maryland Avenue, per a report from WGN-TV. None of these incidents has been tied to Wednesday's shooting in the available police accounts.
Chatham also has state-funded violence-prevention services. As of May 2025, the Illinois Department of Human Services listed KCC Academy, LifeScore Foundation and the National Youth Advocate Program as providers of street outreach, case management and victim services in the neighborhood; Mount Sinai Hospital Medical Center was listed for high-risk youth intervention. These programs are part of the state’s Reimagine Public Safety Act investments in Chatham, a prevention effort separate from the police investigations into individual shootings.
Citywide Numbers Tell a Mixed Story
The Chatham shootings arrive against a backdrop of citywide violence data that cuts both ways. Chicago recorded 130 homicides during the first four months of 2026, compared with 120 during the same period in 2025, according to WTTW. Shootings over that same stretch climbed to 421, a 5% increase from the prior year, while the number of people shot citywide reached 501, up 9% year over year.
The Chicago Tribune's separate accounting found 105 homicides through the first week of April, up from 98 during the same period in 2025. At the same time, other violent-crime categories were trending down: Chicago Police Department data cited by WTTW showed robberies down 25% year to date, armed robberies down 33%, burglaries down 16% and carjackings down 15% at the time of that report.
The early-year increase cited above did not hold through the third quarter: Chicago Police Department figures showed total shootings citywide were down 4% and shooting victims down 2% through Sept. 30, 2026, compared with the same period in 2025. Homicides were down 3% over that span. The figures offer a broader citywide counterpoint to the violence in Chatham, though they do not establish a trend for this neighborhood. WTTW’s account of the September data also noted that month’s homicide total was the lowest for September since 2010.
For now, Wednesday's shooting adds another name to a growing list of Chatham victims in 2026, with the circumstances surrounding the attack still under investigation and no suspect identified.
