The shooting at the Highland Park Fourth of July parade on Monday put the North Shore city in chilling company with other communities in Chicago and the suburbs, where neighbors, co-workers, students and residents faced horror and tragedy when gunmen opened fire.
In Aurora in 2019, a gunman killed five fellow warehouse workers and wounded others, including five police officers. In DeKalb, five students were killed and 17 others injured in a shooting at Northern Illinois University in 2008. Less than two weeks ago, a WeatherTech worker in Bolingbrook shot three of his co-workers, killing one.
It’s a dark community club that, once joined, makes every other shooting feel closer to home, said Clayton Muhammad, a spokesman for the city of Aurora. As time passes and national attention fades, the community is left to deal with the reality of what happened.
“There is nothing else we can do,” he said. “Either we were going to come down with something that happened that day and killed those innocent souls and (let that) define us, or we could come together.”
[ What we know about the mass shooting in Highland Park ]
It wasn’t the first shooting in the northern suburbs over the July 4 holiday weekend. In 1999, a 21-year-old white supremacist who grew up in the North Shore communities of Wilmette and Northfield went on a multi-day shooting spree targeting members of racial and religious minority groups in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood, the suburbs of Skokie and Northbrook, Springfield, Decatur, Urbana and Indiana. It killed two people, including former Northwestern basketball coach Ricky Birdsong, and injured nine others.
In the years since, other suburbs have faced workplace and public shootings. These are some of them.
A large bullet lies on the ice a few feet from where Greg Zanis left five crosses south of the Pratt Plant on February 16, 2019. (Abel Uribe/Chicago Tribune)
On February 15, 2019, a disgruntled employee opened fire at Henry Pratt Co., killing five co-workers, wounding another employee and wounding five police officers before being killed in a shootout with police. The shooter had been ordered years earlier to give up the gun he used in the shooting after authorities discovered he should never have obtained a gun permit. He did not obey and was never forced to give up the gun.
Every anniversary of the shooting deepens the wounds of that day, but it’s important to commemorate the tragedy, Muhammad said. Years later, the reality of the shooting remains for those who lost loved ones, familiar officers who were wounded or who continue to work at Henry Pratt Co.
Those years have also forced the city to think about how to move forward, he said. In the immediate aftermath, the city came together, adopting the “Aurora Strong” mentality. That solidarity was important, but it’s also important to try to maintain unity without forever associating it with tragedy.
“It means devastation in those moments, but it also builds a new level of dedication,” he said.
[ Timeline: List of recent high-profile shootings in the US ]
Police officers rush to the scene of a shooting on the Northern Illinois University campus on February 14, 2008. (Eric Sumberg/Daily Chronicle)
A gunman kicked in the stage door of a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University on Valentine’s Day in 2008 and fired into the auditorium, killing five students and wounding 17 others.
Less than seven minutes after the ambush began, he turned the gun on himself.
In the months leading up to the shooting, a series of events sent the shooter, a former NIU student, into a tailspin and spurred a violent return to mental illness, a report later released by the university found.
The former DeKalb mayor told the Aurora Beacon-News in 2019 that the stunned community searched for answers in the weeks after the shooting, eventually rallying around the lyrics from the NIU Huskies’ fight song: “Forward, forward together.” Although the community has come out stronger, the memory of the shooting remains, Jerry Smith said at the time.
Police go through the process of removing the bodies of 5 women killed in a shooting at the Lane Bryant store at Brookside Marketplace on 191st Street in Tinley Park on February 2, 2008. (Scott Strazzante/Chicago Tribune)
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Days before the NIU shooting, five women were killed at a Lane Bryant store in Tinley Park. Another woman was injured.
Shortly after 10 a.m. on Saturday, February 2, 2008, four women, including two clerks, were in the store when a man entered posing as a delivery boy. The man announced he was robbing the store and forced the four women into a back room, where he bound them with duct tape and ordered them to lie face down on the floor, police said.
Two other women who entered the store at some time were tied up in the back room with the others.
When police arrived, they found five of the women dead, shot in the back of the head. A sixth woman was also shot and survived.
The case has never been solved.
A man comforts a woman outside the Navistar plant after a man shot and killed four others in Melrose Park on February 5, 2001. (Mario Pettiti/Chicago Tribune)
In February 2001, a former employee of Navistar International Corp. broke into the company’s Melrose Park plant and opened fire. William D. Baker killed four workers and injured four others before taking his own life. Baker used a golf bag to hide a cache of weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle.
sfreishtat@chicagotribune.com
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