CHICAGO (CBS) — The mother of a 17-year-old boy who was wounded in a mass shooting that left two people dead and seven others injured late Thursday night on the Near North Side was just steps away when the gunfire rang out, and did everything she could to keep her son alive.
“My baby could’ve died in my hands. I just told him, ‘Just stay up. Just talk to mommy.’ Me and the officer said, ‘Just keep saying your birthday.’ He’s been up ever since,” Kimberly Saunders said.
Saunders lives downtown, and around 10:30 p.m. she was calling her 17-year-old son, Parnelius, to find out where he was past curfew, and she heard rounds of bullets from a block away.
She ran over, and found him lying on the ground outside the McDonald’s restaurant and CTA station near Chicago Avenue and State Street.
A chaotic, heartbreaking video shows her pressing down on his wounds, kneeling in the street in the middle of the madness to try to stop the bleeding.
She said, before the shooting, her son was just hanging out at the McDonald’s, when a fight broke out. It escalated, and he was caught in the crossfire.
“So he got shot nine times, and we’re just trying to find out now what … it’s a waiting game,” she said.
Now he’s recovering at Stroger Hospital, in intensive care after surgery.
Another victim of the shooting spoke to CBS 2 after he was released from Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he was treated for two gunshot wounds.
“I was just with friends, just chilling. That’s all,” Marshawn Davis said. “Two of my friends are dead.”