African American male Albert Abu, 57, was killed just after midnight on December 25, 2017, on a quiet stretch of the 8100 block of South Wabash Avenue in Chicago's Chatham neighborhood.
Standing on the sidewalk near his home, the 57-year-old man was approached by two males who closed the distance and opened fire. Bullets struck his head and chest, and the stillness of the early Christmas morning fractured into sirens and flashing lights.
He lived on the same block where he fell.
Albert Abu was rushed to St. Bernard Hospital, where doctors could only confirm that his wounds were fatal. He was pronounced dead at 12:28 a.m., scarcely minutes after the attack that began at 12:14 a.m.
The span between those times marks the narrow window in which neighbors and first responders tried to reverse the course of a night already veering toward tragedy.
Detectives from Area South opened a homicide investigation. In the first hours after the shooting, no one was in custody, and the only description available was stark and brief: two male assailants who walked up and fired before disappearing again into the dark. The killing of 57 year old Albert Abu was counted among a cluster of holiday-weekend shootings citywide, a grim ledger that underscored how quickly celebration can turn to mourning.
Public records and memorial pages would later capture only the essentials of the 57 year old victim's death: the date, the neighborhood, the block, the hospital, and the unanswered questions that followed.
No subsequent reporting has identified any arrests in the case, and the assailants remain unnamed in the record available to the public. Albert Abu endures in remembrances that list him among those lost to gun violence that day.
