Police responding to the West Loop apartment could not determine where the bullet or bullets came from, according to CBS News Chicago. The apartment had bullet holes in its windows and living-room ceiling, and Abby and her boyfriend also found damage to their deck furniture.
By Thursday morning, Abby had seen a Citizen App notification and showed it to her boyfriend, who found a shattered living-room window with a bullet hole. Abby discovered additional damage to the apartment windows and deck furniture. She later posted a TikTok video showing the damage and a bullet hole in the ceiling. CBS News Chicago reported that the couple had heard what sounded like gunshots Wednesday night; her boyfriend woke her and asked, “did you hear that?” They went back to sleep. CBS News Chicago reported the details.
The couple called police after discovering the damage. Officers took their report but did not arrive until about two hours after the call, CBS News Chicago reported. Police told them they did not know where the bullet had come from. Officers suggested it may have struck the building’s seventh and 10th floors and speculated that people could have been shooting at each other from the nearby highway.
Shell Casings Found Near the Building
While processing what happened, Abby received a Citizen App notification reporting that nine shell casings had been recovered about 100 feet from her building, in the 800 block of West Van Buren Street. The notification offers a possible clue to where the gunfire originated, though it has not been confirmed by police as part of an official investigation into the incident, per the same CBS News Chicago account.
Not an Isolated Problem Downtown
The West Loop incident follows similar scares in the South Loop reported in August 2021. Police said the most recent of those happened on a Saturday night around 9:50 p.m. at Cullerton and Indiana, where a bullet pierced an apartment window and traveled through a wall below a television, according to WGN-TV. Officers located bullets at that scene but recovered no shell casings.
Chicago Police Commander Patricia Zuber pointed to another similar case on June 29 near 14th and Clark, WGN-TV reported, in which a bullet traveled through Clark Street, struck a second-floor patio door and ended up lodged in a kitchen cabinet. In a separate case from October 2024, a 20-year-old woman was reported injured by a stray bullet from a nearby robbery while inside her Chatham apartment, according to an ABC7 Chicago report.
Citywide Shootings Trending Slightly Higher
The West Loop damage comes as Chicago's 2026 crime numbers have run slightly ahead of last year's historically low totals. The city recorded 105 homicides through the first week of April, up from 98 during the same period in 2025, with 266 people suffering nonfatal gunshot injuries since the start of the year, according to the Chicago Tribune.
By the end of June, the city had recorded 210 homicides, nearly 6% more than the same stretch of 2025, along with 686 shootings and 858 shooting victims, an increase of 4% year-over-year, per WTTW. Police had also recovered 5,149 firearms since the start of the year through June, including 857 in June alone, though violent crime on CTA train and bus lines was down 28% compared with the year before, the outlet reported.
Chicago Shooting-Victim Totals Fell in 2025
For a comparison of the latest complete years, preliminary CPD data recorded 2,797 shooting victims in 2024 and 1,847 in 2025, according to ABC7 Chicago. Those citywide figures do not establish the source of the West Loop gunfire.
