Shooting that killed 6-month-old likely gang retaliation, source says BY FRANK MAIN, MITCH DUDEK, LISA DONOVAN, STEFANO ESPOSITO AND FRAN SPIELMAN Staff Reporters 
 
 Updated: 
 
 As teddy bears and balloons piled up Tuesday night near the South Side spot where a 6-month-old girl was fatally shot and her father wounded, detectives continued to scour the Woodlawn neighborhood for leads. “We don’t have one individual who is stepping up to help us,” Supt. Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy told reporters Monday that homicides were down 26 percent this year, compared with the same period a year earlier. A police source said Jonathan Watkins may have been targeted in retaliation for alleged links to an earlier robbery and shooting. Watkins was recovering from bullet wounds at Northwestern Memorial Hospital as a funeral was planned for his daughter, Jonylah. While police are exploring several different angles to the investigation, McCarthy said Tuesday that “there are very strong gang overtones to this event.” 
 
 Police sources say Watkins, 29, is a gang member who has been arrested 30 times, including once in 2007 police for illegal possession of a 9mm handgun, which he told police he was carrying for protection, court records show. Corey Brooks, who is acting as the Watkins family spokesman, to assist in obtaining help from hesitant family members. On Monday afternoon, Watkins was standing on the curb in the 6500 block of South Maryland, changing his daughter’s diaper on the front passenger seat of a minivan, when a gunman emerged unnoticed from a gangway behind him and opened fire. After several surgeries, Jonylah Watkins passed away Tuesday morning, Chicago Pastor Corey Brooks confirmed. Brooks initially said Jonylah had been shot five times, but a law enforcement report indicates one bullet entered her right shoulder and exited her left buttocks. Watkins remained hospitalized in critical condition Tuesday, with gunshot wounds to the side, buttocks and cheek, but he spoke briefly by phone with the Chicago Sun-Times. Also on Tuesday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel called the shooting “a senseless, despicable act of violence that is heartbreaking.” 
 
 Although the city saw homicides drop in February by 50 percent from the previous year — a trend continuing into March — Emanuel said that progress in reducing violence “is only one measure.” 
 
 Monday’s shooting was Jonylah’s second brush with gun violence. The girl's mother, Judy Watkins, was shot in the knee while she was pregnant with Jonylah, according to the woman's mother, Mary Young. Jonathan Watkins and his daughter had been visiting friends in the neighborhood when the shooting occurred, said Mary Young, the baby’s maternal grandmother. Police are still looking for the shooter, who ran up from behind Watkins, fired, and then took off to a nearby blue conversion van, department spokesman John Mirabelli said.
– Jonathan Watkins was changing his baby daughter's diaper in the front passenger seat of a minivan parked on a Chicago street yesterday when someone opened fire on them. Six-month-old Jonylah Watkins was shot five times, in the thigh, shoulder, lung, liver, and bowels, and "she didn't make it," her father tells the Chicago Sun-Times. "I was trying to help. I was trying to help. I was trying to help her." Watkins, himself in critical condition, says he has no idea who the gunman could have been, though police believe Watkins was the chosen target, reports NBC Chicago. Chicago's police superintendent says that Watkins is a gang member with a lengthy criminal past, reports the AP. In a wrenching twist, the girl had already made it through one shooting: Jonylah's mother, Judy Watkins, was shot in the knee in the same neighborhood when she was eight months pregnant with her daughter; residents say gunfire is common in the area. The gunman fled after the shooting; police are looking into an angry Facebook post that could have prompted the incident, sources say.