18 murders in 24 hours: Inside Chicago’s deadliest day in 60 years

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The Chicago Police Department building near the city’s Chinatown
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Eighteen people were killed in Chicago in a 24-hour span last month — the deadliest day in the Windy City in roughly six decades, according to a report.

The slayings — including a high school student and a college freshman who aspired to become a correctional officer — occurred on May 31 as the city grappled with ongoing civil unrest in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis police custody, the Chicago Sun-Times reports.

The grim tally made May 31 the single most violent day Chicago has endured in roughly 60 years, according to data provided to the newspaper by the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

“We’ve never seen anything like it, at all,” the crime lab’s senior research director, Max Kapustin, told the newspaper. “I don’t even know how to put it into context. It’s beyond anything that we’ve ever seen before.”

Data from the lab does not pre-date 1961, but the next-highest single-day murder total in Chicago was on Aug. 4, 1991, when 13 Chicagoans died in homicides, according to the report.

When the entire weekend is taken into context, 25 people were killed citywide from late May 29 through May 31, while another 85 people were hurt by gunfire, the Sun-Times reports, making it the most violent weekend in modern Chicago history.

While citing an “unprecedented” level of activity within the past week, a Chicago police spokesman said detectives were investigating several incidents and working to determine motives.

“The department is actively working to seek justice for all the residents impacted, especially those who have been killed or injured by these senseless acts of violence,” police spokesman Thomas Ahern told the Sun-Times in a statement.

Police brass canceled time off for all cops after “increased violent and criminal activity” starting on May 30. The move allowed the department to direct its “full force of manpower” into neighborhoods in Chicago’s South and West sides, Ahern said.

Among those killed on May 31 was Angelo Bronson, a 36-year-old father of two visiting his hometown from Washington, DC. Bronson was standing outside in Englewood when he was shot in the chest during a drive-by shooting. He died hours later, the newspaper reports.

Also killed in separate shooting incidents were two 18-year-old students, Lazarra Daniels and Keishanay Bolden, who had hopes of becoming a correctional officer, according to the Sun-Times.

Cops discovered Daniels, who attended DRW College Prep in Lawndale, shot in the head in West Garfield Park. She was pronounced dead at the scene, the newspaper reported earlier this month.

Earlier that day, Bolden died during an argument in Englewood, where a male suspect shot her in the torso and fled in a dark sedan, the Sun-Times previously reported.

Bolden, who attended Western Illinois University, was known at the college for her “determination, intelligence and joy.” She wrote on gun violence in her community for a college assignment last year, according to the Sun-Times.

“When one person is hurt everybody is hurt,” Bolden wrote. “We all might not hurt the same, but we can feel that pain when one of ours is hurt.”