Chicago Boy Amari Brown Among 3 Dead, 27 Injured In Just 8-Hour Span

In just an eight-hour span during the Fourth of July weekend, gun violence in Chicago left three people dead and 27 wounded. Amari Brown, a 7-year-old boy on the city's West Side, was the youngest of the fatalities.

Those 30 shootings came between 9:20 p.m Saturday and 4:45 a.m. Sunday, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Amari had spent the day celebrating with family and riding his scooter up and down the block where he lived with his grandmother and several other relatives in Humboldt Park. Just before midnight, a gunman opened fire outside a relative's home where Amari and other children were playing, hitting both the 7-year-old and a 26-year-old woman in the chest.

Amari was pronounced dead at an area hospital about two hours later. Police told the Chicago Sun-Times neither Amari nor the woman was the intended target.

Amari Brown, killed a few min before midnite. Mother asks killer @WGNNews, "why did you take my baby away from me?" http://pic.twitter.com/SdYqQEawCR

— Randi Belisomo (@RandiBelisomo) July 5, 2015

Family described Amari as "a sweet, sweet little boy" who loved to joke and dance, and who "had a big imagination."

“It’s crazy. Like who would shoot a 7-year-old? He got shot in the chest. Who would do that? To a baby?” Amari's grandmother Vedia Hailey told the Sun-Times. “All the kids that are getting killed out here -- it’s crazy. When is it going to stop?”

No arrests have been made. Family members will hold a press conference Sunday afternoon to call for Amari's killer to turn himself in.

During the same eight-hour span in which Amari was shot, the other shooting deaths included two 26-year-old men shot in separate incidents on the Northwest Side and the far South Side.

As of Sunday afternoon, a total of nine people were killed and 35 injured since the long holiday weekend started Thursday afternoon, according to DNAinfo Chicago. Police Supt. Garry McCarthy had promised "all hands on deck" during the holiday weekend to avoid a repeat of last year's Fourth of July shooting levels.

In 2014, 82 people were shot, 14 of them fatally.

Chicago has already tallied more than 220 homicides so far this year, at least 200 of which have been from shootings, according to RedEye Chicago's Homicide Tracker.

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