Neal Zarei, a 29-year-old Hispanic/Latino man, was shot on the evening of November 20, 2008, as he left a funeral home parking lot in Chicago's Gage Park neighborhood. At about 7:41 p.m., gunfire erupted in the 5200 block of South Kedzie Avenue; the shooter fled into the night, leaving Zarei mortally wounded. He was taken to John H. Stroger Jr. Hospital of Cook County and pronounced dead at 8:17 p.m.
In the hours that followed, police said the attack appeared to be gang-related, tied to the funeral of a known gang member that had just concluded. Detectives from the Wentworth Area opened the investigation, but no one was in custody by early the next morning. The crime scene—set against the traffic and storefronts of Kedzie Avenue—offered few answers about the assailant's path away from the parking lot once the shots were fired.
Zarei's death drew him into the larger tapestry of violence that gripped Chicago that year, but the details that emerged remained stark and spare: the time, the block, the rush to the hospital, and the official word that the motive pointed toward gang conflict. Listings that memorialize the case place the killing in Gage Park and echo that the shooting happened in a parking area, underscoring how public the moment was and how quickly it dissolved into anonymity for the person who pulled the trigger.
Public accounts and case summaries do not document any subsequent arrests in Zarei's killing, nor do they identify a named suspect. Over time, the case has been cataloged among cold-case and memorial platforms that repeat the essential facts but stop at the same unresolved edge: an ambush after a funeral, a flight into the dark, and an investigation that, at least in publicly available records, has not produced charges.
