African-American/Black male Albert Abu, age 57, was gunned down just after midnight on December 25, 2017, in Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood. At about 12:14 a.m., he was standing on the sidewalk in the 8100 block of South Wabash Avenue—steps from his own home—when two males walked up and opened fire. He was struck in the head and chest, rushed to St. Bernard Hospital, and pronounced dead at 12:28 a.m.
The location, timeline, and manner of the attack were documented by police and the Cook County medical examiner in contemporaneous reporting.
The killing unfolded during a violent Christmas holiday stretch citywide. In coverage summing up the long weekend, local outlets detailed five people killed and at least twenty others wounded between Friday and the early hours after Christmas, with Abu’s slaying identified as the most recent of the fatal shootings that weekend. His death was set against this bleak backdrop of holiday gunfire that touched multiple neighborhoods across the South and West Sides.
In the immediate aftermath, detectives from Area South opened a homicide investigation, and authorities reported no one in custody. Subsequent roundups of the weekend’s violence and remembrance pages that referenced the case likewise did not announce an arrest or name a suspect, underscoring that the shooters who approached on foot and opened fire had not been publicly identified.
