Amanda McClendon, 25, a Black/African American woman, was shot inside a South Shore apartment building on the 7700 block of South Essex Avenue just before midnight on Friday, August 29, 2025. Police who answered a call of a person shot found the building’s front door standing open and discovered Amanda McClendon, 25, and another woman, 23, wounded inside.
The scene was quiet in the way late summer nights can be, the sudden rupture of violence leaving only the open door, the echo of footsteps in the corridor, and the quick choreography of first responders as they moved the victims toward waiting ambulances.
Amanda McClendon, 25, suffered gunshot wounds to the abdomen and leg and was transported to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead; the 23-year-old victim was shot in both legs and survived in fair condition. The details that filtered out by morning sketched a narrow window of time and place—just before midnight, a residential hallway, two women caught in gunfire—and left a broader outline of a life ended abruptly at twenty-five.
Detectives said they were questioning a person of interest in the shooting as the investigation unfolded, but authorities did not announce charges or identify a suspect in the immediate aftermath. In the days that followed, local listings and memorial pages marked the date and location of Amanda McClendon’s death even as official updates remained spare, the case lingering in that uneasy space between an initial canvass and any public naming of a perpetrator.
