The couple had been arguing inside a white car parked on the street in the South Shore neighborhood Monday night when the man jumped out, a gun in his hand, according to Chicago police.
He started shooting at the woman behind the wheel, witnesses told investigators, and she tried to drive away but crashed into a parked car around 8:15 p.m. in the 7800 block of South Bennett Avenue.
The man then shot himself in the head and fell to the ground next to a tree in the strip of grass between the street and sidewalk, where he was pronounced dead, police said.
Officers found him with a gun in his hand, a source said. Not far away, the car sat facing north on Bennett Avenue, just north of 78th Street, its front bumper dented and driver’s door swung open.
The man was identified Tuesday morning as Derell D. Sikes, 27, who lived on the block. The woman’s family and sources identified the woman as Jasmine Johnson, 25. She was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead.
At least a dozen of her relatives and close friends had been waiting at the hospital when they learned she had died around 10 p.m. Sobs, screams and pleas of “no” filled the lobby and vestibule outside the hospital’s emergency department.
They grieved in their own way. Some comforted each other, others sought solitude.
A woman slammed through the vestibule’s double doors, crying as she she burst onto the sidewalk. “No, what the [expletive], that’s some bull…,” she screamed.
Inside the hallway, another woman slid her back down the wall until she was sitting. She folded her knees against her chest.
In the vestibule, a relative talked on the phone. “She dead,” the woman said, leaning against a door for a few moments of support before walking outside, where repeated cries of “why, why, why, why?” carried through the air.
Two men, one on each side, walked a woman down the sidewalk toward the rest of the family inside the hospital, each with an arm around her, helping her forward.
“That’s my baby,” the woman said, over and over, as the trio made their way through the vestibule. “That’s my baby, that’s my baby, that’s my baby.”
chicagobreaking@chicagotribune.com
