Estella Robinson doesn’t want any more mothers to know the horror of losing a child to a bullet.
Her son, L.C. Robinson III, was shot and killed just after midnight Aug. 15 while he was standing on a corner chatting with a friend. He was 39, a carpenter, the father of four. No one has been charged with his murder.
Driven by gangs, drugs and guns, the bloodshed in President Obama’s adopted hometown has resulted in a body count that exceeds the 312 murders this year in New York and 212 in Los Angeles, cities with populations dwarfing that of the Windy City. The toll here is up 25% from 2011: 391 through Sept. 23.
Last week, two men who had been beaten to death were found in the trunk of a car. The same day, a 17-year-old boy and a 33-year-old man were found shot to death. Those and others to be added to the official tally push the number of homicides in Chicago through September to the 400 mark for the first time since 2003. That year, 601 murders were documented here; annual totals have been in the 400s since 2009.
Jack Levin, a sociology and criminology professor at Boston’s Northeastern University, says it’s troubling that Chicago’s murder count is rising while it falls in other major cities. In 2010, Los Angeles had 297 murders, the lowest since 1967. New York homicides have been declining since 1990, when a record 2,245 fell in the nation’s largest city.
More from Judy Keen, USA Today
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