Courtney Young, a 36-year-old Black / African American male from Chicago, spent the evening of April 10, 2013, walking with his younger brother near 120th Street and Normal Avenue in the city's West Pullman neighborhood, not far from the 600 block of West 119th Street where he lived. A familiar stretch of residential street on the Far South Side became something else entirely when two men approached the brothers on foot around 8:30 p.m.
and suddenly opened fire, shattering the ordinary rhythm of the block with a burst of gunshots.
When the gunfire stopped and neighbors' calls for help reached authorities, police arrived to find Courtney on the ground with multiple gunshot wounds to his torso, his brother wounded nearby. He was gravely injured where he fell, and despite efforts after first responders reached the scene, he was pronounced dead there at 11:03 p.m., the violence claiming his life before he could be moved to a hospital. His younger brother survived with a gunshot wound to the leg and was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where he was listed in stable condition, leaving one brother alive to carry the memory of the last walk they took together.
Officers and detectives worked the scene in the darkness that followed, marking shell casings, speaking to witnesses and trying to trace the path of the two gunmen who had fled on foot immediately after the shooting. In the hours after Courtney's death, police reported that no one was in custody, and the search for the attackers moved from the flashing lights of that block into the longer, quieter work of an open homicide investigation.
As the years passed, the case did not receive the resolution his family and community needed. Case summaries compiled later describe how the investigation failed to produce any immediate suspects and still list the killing as an unsolved homicide, asking anyone with information to come forward with updates. His death is recorded there as one among many shootings that marked a particularly violent period in Chicago, a brief paragraph and a few lines of data standing in for an entire life cut short, and for a family left to mourn without answers while his killers remain unnamed.
