Neighbors pass by a memorial Monday for a 9-year-old girl who was shot and killed Saturday outside her apartment in Portage Park, Chicago.
A 9-year-old girl was fatally shot in front of her Chicago home by a neighbor, who allegedly fired the gun at her before her father ran toward the shooter and tackled him to the ground, according to a legal document CNN obtained Tuesday.
Michael Goodman, 43, is charged with first-degree murder in the killing of the child, who rode her scooter to buy ice cream from a nearby ice cream truck before the shooting Saturday evening, according to the document.
The shooting comes as the US continues to grapple with widespread gun violence, which is the leading cause of death in children and teenagers in the country.
Firearms accounted for nearly 19% of childhood deaths (ages 1-18) in 2021, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Wonder database. Nearly 3,600 children died in gun-related incidents that year.
Before Saturday’s shooting, the girl’s father was talking to friends who were in a vehicle in front of his Portage Park residence while his daughter, identified as “V,” was riding her scooter, according to the document, known as a bond proffer.
The father heard a gunshot and told his daughter to take her scooter back to the apartment.
“As V approached the front door of her apartment building, D (shooter) emerged from his apartment building across the street holding a firearm,” the document states.
The father and other witnesses saw the neighbor – identified as Michael Goodman – across the street as he approached the child, and the father shouted at the neighbor “what he was doing,” according to the document.
“While V’s father ran to his daughter, he observed D raise the firearm, point it at the V, and shoot the V in the head. V’s father tackled D into the vestibule and as they both fell to the ground the gun discharged, striking D in the eye,” the document said.
The child was taken to a hospital where she was pronounced dead. The suspect was arrested and taken to a hospital.
Police swabbed the suspect’s hands while he was in the hospital, and they tested positive for gunshot residue, the document said. A 9 mm Canik firearm was recovered outside the apartment.
Goodman is being held without bail at authorities’ request.
“The defendant is responsible for the death of a person and the defendant was armed with a firearm and that he personally discharged that firearm and it proximately caused death to another individual,” the document states.
The gun violence epidemic in the United States was deadlier than ever in 2021, according to a report released this year by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.
Both gun-related homicides and suicides reached record levels in 2021, leading to nearly 49,000 total firearm deaths.
Firearm-related deaths soared during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic and spiked again in the second year. The 8% jump – leading to about 3,600 more deaths in 2021 than in 2020 – was the largest single-year increase in four decades.
“Our country is breaking records for all the wrong reasons – record gun sales combined with increasingly permissive gun laws are making gun violence a pervasive part of life in our country, leading to a sharp increase in gun deaths,” Ari Davis, policy adviser at the center and lead author of the report, said in a statement.
More than half of all firearm deaths, as well as most of the year-over-year increase, were suicides, the report found.
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