Seven-year-old Akeem Briscoe was in the bathroom washing his hands before dinner on Wednesday night when gunfire erupted yet again outside his Chicago home.
The boy’s family heard the sound of a bullet striking a window and saw him emerge clutching his abdomen. He had become one of nearly 300 children shot this year in a city whose mayor just announced she is awarding herself a 5 percent “cost of living” raise.
On Saturday, Akeem had attended his father’s funeral. Akbar Briscoe died earlier this month following open-heart surgery. Akeem’s mother, Deidra Misters, is said by family to have been devastated by the death.
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Now on Wednesday night, she rode with her son in an ambulance to Stroger Hospital.
“I’m OK,” the boy assured her, according to the family’s account.
Akeem loved school and he had returned to Newberry Elementary Math & Science Academy this week after his father’s death. He had asked his uncle, Terribia Misters, to go with him on a Thursday field trip. And then would come Halloween.
“I was going to take him trick-or-treating,” Terribia told The Daily Beast.
Akeem had not yet decided what he wanted to be. But it seems likely it would have been the same thing as on the three previous Halloweens, when his uncle escorted him from door to door.
“Spiderman,” Terribia said. “I know he liked Spiderman.”.
The uncle was at work on Wednesday night when he got a call that Akeem had been shot. The uncle raced to the house in Humboldt Park.
“Flying on the highway, flying in the streets, running red lights,” he recalled.
He arrived to discover the home had become a crime scene, closed off to everybody but the detectives. The boy’s mother called from the hospital.
“She said, ‘He’s in surgery at the moment and he’s doing alright for now,’” he recalled. “She said they had to stop some blood. She said he had internal bleeding.”
She asked the uncle to stand watch over the house and ensure it was not left open. She called back a short time later with an update on the boy.
“And said, ‘He’s all right. He might have to go for surgery this morning,’” he remembered.
A half-hour later, she called again. Akeem had taken a bad turn.
“She told me he’s gone,” the uncle recalled.
Akeem had become one of more than 40 Chicago children killed by guns this year. And four days after burying her husband, Deidra Misters had to make plans for burying her son.
A neighbor’s surveillance camera had captured the shooting on video and they showed the footage to the uncle as well as the police. The three suspected shooters were young men in their twenties whom the uncle immediately recognized.
“They stay a couple doors down,” he said. “Somebody came, somebody was shooting at them. Enemies shoot at them. They shoot back.”
The uncle said the same scenario had played out by the three young men and others on numerous occasions in the surrounding area.
“There’s definitely been a lot of shootings,” the uncle reported. “It’s been shootings a couple blocks away, a block away, a half-block away, [on ] the corner.”
Sometimes, gunfire erupted when Akeem was outside playing with his friend Little A.J. Akeem knew to immediately head inside.
On Wednesday night, Akeem was in what should have been the security of his home. All seemed well as his mother helped him prepare for his field trip.
Then it was dinner time and he knew to go into the bathroom to wash his hands. He was taking a precaution against germs in a city of guns when the bullet came through the window.
On the day he would have been on the field trip, Akeem lay dead at the morgue while his mother faced arranging a second funeral.
“You gotta kinda of come up with funds to do so,” the uncle said. “I think my sister’s trying to wait to see if her insurance gonna pay through.”
Mayor Lori Lightfoot held what was scheduled to be a briefing on “Halloween and safety.” She instead spoke of Akeem and a 15-year-old also killed Wednesday in an unrelated drive-by-shooting.
“As many of you know, this morning we woke to the news that we'd lost two more young people to the tragedy of gun violence in our city,” she said. “These two boys should have been in school today, anxiously awaiting a weekend of fun. They should have gone on celebrating every year afterwards. Instead, today, two families have been ripped apart, tragic loss that the families are dealing with, and a city once again is mourning the loss of two of our precious young people.”
She gave an impassioned call for anyone who knows anything to come forward and declared that the whole city must do more to stop the carnage. Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown stepped up to the podium and announced a $15,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. He gave an impassioned call for getting illegal guns off the street and holding to account those who carry them. He could have noted that murder in the city is down 17 percent and shootings are down 20 percent, but crime is up 39 percent overall and now a 7-year-old had been fatally shot in his home.
Down in Humboldt Park, the home that became a crime scene had reverted back, but forever absent of Akeem.
Terriba sat with Akeem’s uncharacteristically subdued dog, a pitbull named Angel, and spoke to The Daily Beast of the boy who should have been on a field trip that day.
“He loved kids,” he said. “He couldn't wait to go to school. He was doing his best to learn everything.
“He was a great kid looking for greatness. He could have been a spokesman because he loved to talk. He could have been a poetry writer.”
He reported that the mayor had not visited the family to help them deal with their tragic loss and assure them the whole city joined them in mourning.
“She ain’t been over here. ’Cause this is a bad neighborhood probably. I don’t know,” he said.
He was aware of her self-awarded raise—from $209,915 a year to $216,210.
“Far as I’m concerned the only thing she care about is money right now,” he said.
However true or untrue that may be, there is no denying that a leader giving herself a cost-of-living increase does not go over well with a family facing the cost of dying.
“I think the raise should go for solving murders,” the uncle said.
