Chicago Tribune reporter Adam Sege recaps the night's crime, including a police involved shooting that left a 15-year-old boy dead. (Posted Monday, June 17, 2013) 
 
 As she headed out the door Sunday morning, Adrianne Wilberton put on a brave face. It was time to tell her son the news, and she didn't want him hearing it from anyone else. 
 
 But her composure unraveled as she walked toward the car, a barrage of neighbors hugging her on the way out of her apartment. By the time she reached the front lawn, the mother of six was in tears. 
 
 "Our son is dead! Oh Jesus!" the 57-year-old screamed, referring to Cortez, one of her three sons, who was killed earlier that morning on Chicago's West Side. "Oh my God! Oh my God! We were just talking." 
 
 At least 34 people were shot — nine of them fatally — Saturday afternoon through Father's Day Sunday, stretching from 94th Street and Loomis Avenue on the South Side up to about North Avenue and North Pulaski Road on the Northwest Side, according to authorities. The youngest person killed during one of the bloodiest weekends in Chicago this year, 15-year-old Michael Westley, was fatally shot by a police officer Sunday night. 
 
 Shootings from Friday afternoon into Saturday left another 13 people shot, 1 fatally. The combined tally resulted in 47 people shot, and eight killed this weekend. Last year at about the same time, there were 53 people shot, nine fatally in one weekend. 
 
 The rash of violent crime came as Chicago has seen a large dip in overall homicide and shooting numbers so far this year. 
 
 When asked whether this weekend's shooting numbers cast doubt on the department's crime-fighting strategies, Chicago police spokesman Adam Collins insisted they are working, noting the city has so far in 2013 posted its lowest homicide totals in years. 
 
 Collins also reiterated a position that police Superintendent Garry McCarthy has expressed publicly throughout the year when discussing the department's crime-fighting efforts. "There's going to be good days, and there's going to be bad days, which is why we've been calling this progress, not victory," said Collins, who pointed out drops in overall crime. 
 
 Across the city, reminders of the bloody weekend literally stained some of Chicago's streets. In the city's Little Village neighborhood, 15 lit memorial candles stood in blood where Ricardo Herrera, 21, was fatally wounded and two others shot on the 2500 block of South Ridgeway Avenue. 
 
 About five miles away, a long trail of blood remained splattered in a Northwest Side alley — and on the bumper of a nearby car — where 16-year-old Kevin Rivera tried to run from a gunman on a bicycle, authorities told the Tribune. 
 
 Rivera's family was planning to move in two weeks from their sometimes violent section of the West Humboldt Park neighborhood and a social worker was enrolling the teenager in the city's summer jobs program. 
 
 But late Saturday night, someone shot Rivera in the 4100 block of West North Avenue, police said. He attempted to run but collapsed a few feet away. The boy, who lived a few blocks away from the scene, was pronounced dead about 1:35 a.m. Sunday at Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center, authorities said. 
 
 Grief-stricken and exhausted, Kevin Rivera's family said little about Rivera or his death. "I can't believe it," said Rivera's mother, Maria Figueroa. 
 
 One of six siblings, Rivera could be polite and soft-spoken at home, even as he became increasingly embroiled in neighborhood gang conflicts and faced juvenile court charges. Last year, he was shot in the leg, and he was briefly detained in the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center and placed on juvenile court probation for carrying an unloaded gun in the neighborhood, according to interviews with relatives. 
 
 His younger sister Yajaira Rivera last year was profiled in a Tribune investigation about elementary students who missed months of school each year. Rivera also missed weeks of school each year at Nobel Elementary School, where he earned an A in 7th grade art class but failed basic courses and had run-ins with teachers and staff, school records and interviews show. 
 
 In a brief Tribune interview last year, Rivera said he had tried to register at Orr Academy High School, but left after a couple of days because he didn't feel safe there. "There is a lot of tension," he said. 
 
 Social worker Emily Runyan, who lived in the neighborhood and befriended Rivera's family, was recently working to enroll Rivera in the city's One Summer Chicago teen jobs program. 
 
 "I don't want to memorialize him because he made some bad choices, but Kevin was a kind, quiet and sensitive kid," Runyan said. "I truly believe he wanted more for his life, but was a victim of many things." 
 
 One of the men killed — 24-year-old Antwon Johnson — was shot by police early Sunday in the Lawndale neighborhood after he raised a 9-millimeter handgun in their direction after bailing from a moving car and falling, police said. 
 
 His mother disputed that account. "It's not true," said Stacy Liberty. "How could someone have a gun and point it to you if they're already on the ground?" 
 
 Liberty said the car had been lurching down the block because the people in the car were trying to identify an address. The presence of a police car behind them must have made Johnson nervous, his mother said. 
 
 Johnson had been convicted three times for drug related charges stemming back to 2006, according to court records. He suffered three gunshot wounds almost two years ago, she said. 
 
 But the father of two five-year-old sons was trying to get his life back on track, she said. 
 
 "He hasn’t been in trouble in a while," said Liberty, who rushed to the scene and recalled seeing her son's lifeless body in the alley. "He was trying to get his stuff together. Black men on the street today, it's tough for them to get a job because the first thing (employers) look at is their record." 
 
 Another victim included 40-year-old Todd Wood, who authorities said was killed after a gunman opened fire at a club in the city's Grand Crossing neighborhood. Three others were wounded in that attack, police said. 
 
 Several hours after the club shooting, Cortez Wilberton, 31, was added to the homicide list. Wilberton had seen plenty of his friends shot over the year, but hit a turning point a few years back when his best friend was killed, his sister said. A former gang member, Wilberton had a lengthy criminal record that included at least 30 arrests, according to court records. 
 
 "That's when he said, 'That's enough of this here … I don't want to be bothered by all this nonsense,' " said his sister, Tanya Wilberton, 37. 
 
 So he left the gang and started focusing all of his energy on his three children, one of whom was born earlier this month, she said. He liked to take his children — two girls and a boy — to the park and watch the older ones ride their bikes, his mother and sister said. 
 
 Sometime early last year, Wilberton was shot in the stomach during a robbery and had to leave his a job as a security guard at a local store, his sister said. 
 
 Still recovering from reconstructive surgery, he mostly stayed indoors at night but was gunned down at 1:35 a.m. on the 200 block of South Keeler Avenue in the Austin neighborhood. A 31-year-old woman also suffered a graze wound to the face in that incident, police said. 
 
 Around the time Wilberton's family gathered Sunday morning to mourn, Karen Sumner received a call at work telling her to hurry home because police officers wanted to talk about her 19-year-old son. 
 
 "I hope my son's not dead," Sumner remembers saying. "Please, I hope my son's not dead." 
 
 But when she arrived at the family's West Chatham home, officers delivered the news she feared most. 
 
 Her son, Jamal Jones, was shot at about 1:15 a.m. Sunday while riding his bike home from a family member's house through the 7400 block of South Parnell Avenue in the Englewood neighborhood, police and relatives said. He died about an hour later. 
 
 Jones was a friendly, motivated young man who steered away from trouble and was always eager to work, according to relatives. He'd sometimes peddle bottled water to passing cars on 79th Street when he couldn't find construction work, his mother said. 
 
 Jones' uncle, Travis Sumner, said his nephew was a reliable member of his roofing crew. Jones worked as the ground man, picking up trash and making sure supplies got up to the laborers on the roof. 
 
 "He worked hard," the uncle said. "He stayed busy all the time." 
 
 On Sunday afternoon, family members returned to the shooting scene. They found the bike Jones had been riding and needles left over from the paramedics. 
 
 As she recalled getting ready for her job at Jewel-Osco on Sunday morning, Karen Sumner said it was odd that her son wasn't there to say goodbye when she left the house at 3:30 a.m. At that time, she still hadn't heard the news. 
 
 "He would always greet me at the door and kiss me and say 'I love you,' " Karen Sumner said on Sunday. "This morning, he didn’t greet me." 
 
 By Monday morning the toll had grown by another fatality when Alexander Lagunas, 18, was pronounced dead at 10:08 a.m. at Mount Sinai, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office. 
 
 Lagunas, of the 8100 block of South Scottsdale was shot on the 4000 block of West 31st Street at 12:31 a.m. Sunday morning, according to police. 
 
 Tribune reporters Jeremy Gorner, Carlos Sadovi, Kim Geiger, Deanese Williams-Harris and Adam Sege contributed. 
 
 pnickeas@tribune.com 
 
 dyjackson@tribune.com 
 
 mitsmith@tribune.com 
 
 jmdelgado@tribune.com ||||| Two hours into 2016, DeAndre Holiday, a 24-year-old father of three, became another sad statistic of Chicago's runaway violence, fatally shot in the chest as he left a New Year's Eve party in the Bronzeville neighborhood on the South Side. 
 
 In the weeks since, the tally of those killed has hit 50, making January the deadliest start to a year in Chicago in at least 16 years. 
 
 As many people died in January as in many summer months, the usual peak season for violence. 
 
 Holiday's mother, Gwendolyn, is trying to persuade her two other children — and possibly her grandchildren — to move with her to her native Atlanta. 
 
 "The violence is not gonna end. It's getting worse," said the 51-year-old, her eyes watering as she sat on her bed last week in her apartment in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood. "Every day when you turn the news on somebody's child, son, father, brother has lost their lives for no reason. It's senseless to me. It makes no sense. None." 
 
 By 8 a.m. Sunday, the final day of the month, about 280 people had been shot in January, according to a Tribune analysis of Police Department data. Shootings nearly doubled from last January and — perhaps more worrisome — jumped nearly 60 percent from the first month of 2012, the last year in which homicides rose above 500. 
 
 In all, 50 were killed as of Sunday morning — a figure that includes three beating and stabbing deaths, the analysis showed. That's the most homicides in January since at least 2000 — as far back as publicly available city statistics go. The Police Department was unable to provide numbers further back. 
 
 The timing of the upsurge in violence comes at a particularly stressful time for a department that has been roiled in the fallout over the court-ordered release two months ago of a disturbing dashboard camera video showing a Chicago police officer shoot Laquan McDonald 16 times as the 17-year-old walked away from police with a knife in his hand. That has led to murder charges against Officer Jason Van Dyke, weeks of street protests, the firing of longtime police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, calls for the resignation of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and the launch of a U.S. Justice Department investigation of the Police Department. 
 
 Police activity down, violence up 
 
 In a telephone interview Saturday, John Escalante, the interim police superintendent, said while major cities across the country saw upticks in violence last year, Chicago was "literally alone" with its bloody start to 2016. 
 
 The 29-year department veteran expressed concern about morale after hearing worries from officers about being put under the microscope for merely doing their jobs. He acknowledged that the number of street stops has dropped sharply so far this year, though he couldn't provide any figures. 
 
 "I've gone to the roll calls and I've heard their concerns about not wanting to be the next viral video," he said. "Even when they're doing something right, it may not be perceived that way." 
 
 Escalante couldn't say if the drop in police activity has contributed to the rise in violence, but he implied that the numbers might suggest that. 
 
 "We do know that the violent crimes are increasing and the activity that we would normally see from officers seems to have decreased significantly," he said. 
 
 It's important to keep in mind that the violence is far reduced from decades ago when homicides sometimes exceeded 900 in a year. But what continues to be troubling is the fact that Chicago's level of violence far outpaces New York and Los Angeles, both more populous. The two had comparable numbers through about Jan. 23 — some 60 shot or injured, 20 of them fatally, according to the most recent numbers provided. By comparison, at that point, some 210 people had been shot or injured in Chicago, at least 33 of them fatally. 
 
 Andrew Holmes, a familiar face at shooting scenes in his work for Chicago Survivors, which assists grieving families who have lost loved ones through violence, is concerned the city will have a disaster on its hands "if we don't get a handle on this right now." 
 
 It's "very dangerous looking ahead into the spring because it's in the red zone already," he said. 
 
 Crime experts caution about making month-by-month or even year-by-year comparisons of homicides, arguing that long-term trends give a better understanding of how the level of violence in a city has changed over time. 
 
 "There's certain volatility in crime statistics, particularly homicides, where numbers can go up and down to some extent randomly and not because of any particular cause," said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. "So when you have a narrow time frame ... the numbers can be somewhat unreliable ... in terms of indicating a trend." 
 
 But what makes January's numbers so troubling is that the uptick in violence follows two successive years in which shootings rose by double-digits. Homicides also rose by about 12.5 percent last year over 2014. 
 
 What is driving the violence is unclear other than Chicago's unrelenting gang woes in impoverished, segregated pockets of the city's South and West sides. 
 
 Escalante acknowledged his frustration over the year's violent start. He blamed gang disputes, the easy availability of guns and the use of social media to spark slights and animosities, but he admitted the department is uncertain over the exact causes for the uptick. 
 
 "We can't put our finger on any one or two things that are driving this really big spike in violence, especially with the murders," he said. "We look at it every day, talk about it every day, trying to find where we can deploy resources better or what we can look for to try to predict the next potential shooting location." 
 
 To increase police visibility in the city's most dangerous neighborhoods, 380 officers and sergeants assigned to foot patrols on the South and West sides have been moved into police cars. That would seem to run counter to department efforts to bridge its gap with minority communities, but Escalante stressed in the interview that the change was temporary. 
 
 In recent weeks, Cook County sheriff's officers have joined with Chicago police to go after gangs and guns on the West Side. 
 
 In addition, Escalante has ordered the department's 22 district commanders to increase their home visits to known gang members as part of a project to offer them social services if they give up the gang life. 
 
 'It's gonna be a war' 
 
 Even with a few days left in the month, January had already recorded more homicides than any since at least 2000. And a forecast of an unseasonably warm final weekend of the month raised fears that the numbers could grow.
– After wrapping up its deadliest month in 20 years, Chicago logged its 500th homicide of the year over Labor Day weekend, when 65 people were shot, including 13 fatally. Nine of those deaths and almost half of all shootings resulting in injuries or deaths occurred between 6am Monday and 3am Tuesday, possibly as individuals and gangs sought retaliation for earlier shootings, police tell the Chicago Tribune, which now counts 512 homicides in the city so far this year, compared to 491 in all of 2015. An 80-year-old man and a woman who was nine months pregnant were among the victims, reports CBS Chicago, which has a detailed breakdown of the shootings.