A 74-year-old man was hit by a paintball in Chicago's East Lakeview community on Wednesday night, and police are searching for whoever fired at him. Some victims in a 2020 wave of Chicago paintball attacks suffered permanent eye damage.
According to CBS News, a man was hit by a paintball while driving in East Lakeview. Police had not yet identified the person responsible.
The East Lakeview case lands amid a history of paintball attacks across the city. Chicago police records showed 208 paintball shootings were reported citywide in September and October 2020, compared with 42 between January and August 2020, according to Chicago Sun-Times. The department said 120 of those attacks had happened since October 1, 2020, per the same account.
Eye Injuries Piling Up at Local Hospitals
The toll on victims' vision has been severe. A University of Chicago Medicine ophthalmologist said the hospital treated eight patients for paintball-related injuries over a single weekend earlier in October, as reported by Chicago Sun-Times. Northwestern Medical Center, per that same report, treated two patients whose eyes were ruptured in paintball attacks in recent weeks.
One woman in Chicago's Garfield Ridge neighborhood suffered an eye-globe rupture and lost her vision after being struck by a paintball, according to CBS News. “She had emergency surgery because she had an eye globe rupture... At the moment, she doesn't have any vision,” a source told the station. Video from that incident, taken on Halloween night, showed a group shooting paintballs at random people from inside a car, the report notes.
Cicero and North Riverside police departments told that woman's family they planned to connect her case to their own paintball-attack investigations involving a vehicle of the same make and color, as noted by CBS Chicago, with investigators reportedly saying, “we're going to loop in your case with ours—same vehicle same color.”
Attacks Have Spread Across Chicago Neighborhoods
The East Lakeview shooting echoes paintball incidents reported across the city in 2020. Chris Trani of Lake View told the Sun-Times he was hit in the forehead during an attack while riding his bike near 2640 N. Sheffield Avenue earlier in October 2020. In a separate Chatham incident in 2020, a 44-year-old CTA bus driver was targeted on a Monday, according to the same report.
In an October 30, 2020, report, ABC7 Chicago said seven people had been attacked within a 24-hour span in the 10th District, and one victim lost an eye. The station also reported that a 33-year-old man was attacked by paintballs on a Thursday night in Streeterville and suffered bruising and swelling to his left hand. An ophthalmologist at the University of Chicago Medical Center warned that high-velocity paintball injuries “can be severely damaging to eyes, and it will often result in permanent vision loss,” per ABC7's reporting.
Other recent attacks have followed a similar pattern of drivers firing at strangers from passing cars. A 38-year-old man suffered an eye injury after someone in a red sedan shot him with a paintball gun on the Near North Side just before 11 p.m. on a Sunday, CBS News reported separately. CWBChicago reported that a 38-year-old man was struck in the eye by paintballs in the 100 block of West Schiller.
A Pattern That Comes in Waves
Paintball violence is not new to Chicago. CWBChicago notes that these attacks tend to arrive in waves, pointing out that incidents spiked during the pandemic after videos of paintball shootings went viral.
Police are searching for the person responsible for the East Lakeview shooting as the investigation continues.
