Chicago ‘L’ train shooting leaves four dead

Four people were killed in a shooting at a Chicago subway station known as the “L” early Monday morning, police said.

Just before 5:30 a.m. local time, police received a report that three people had been shot on a train at the Forest Park CTA (Chicago Transit Authority) Blue Line station. Forest Park police rushed to the scene and found four shooting victims. Three of them were pronounced dead at the scene, while the fourth died later at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Illinois.

The shooting suspect fled the scene, but Chicago police were able to locate the man using a description from surveillance footage. The suspect was detained by police on a CTA Pink Line train in Chicago. A firearm was recovered, but it was not immediately clear if it was the same weapon used in the shooting. The shooting is under investigation, but police said it appears to be an isolated incident with no other threat to the public.

In Chicago, nearly 3,000 people have been shot in 2023, according to The Trace, a nonprofit gun news site. That’s still fewer than the previous year. Shootings in Chicago are down about 16 percent since 2022. As of Aug. 12, shootings in the Windy City were down 2 percent from the same time last year.

Newsweek contacted Forest Park police by phone for further information.

“While this was an isolated incident, this abhorrent and outrageous act of violence should never have occurred, much less on a public transit train,” the CTA said in a statement.

“We commend both the Forest Park Police Department for their thorough and collaborative efforts to provide information to partner agencies, and the Chicago Police Department whose quick actions led to the apprehension of the suspect in this case,” the CTA said in a statement.

Gun violence continues to plague the country, with 11,451 gun deaths and 22,011 gun injuries reported this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks gun violence in the U.S. Of those incidents, 376 were mass shootings, which the Gun Violence Archive defines as an incident in which four or more people are shot or killed, not including the shooter.

“Gun violence leaves a scar on the city,” Lakaya Knight, a 19-year-old Chicagoan, said in an Aug. 16 article for The Trace. “It doesn’t matter how old you are, whether you’re a kid, whether you’re old — it’s like a ticking time bomb,” she said of the trauma left by gun violence.