Spate of mass shootings killed aspiring paramedic visiting Chicago and boy, 14, who had ‘started to turn himself around’

Cynthia Jones shook her head as a neighbor screamed and fell to his knees in front of her fiance. News that her grandson had been killed hadn’t yet gotten far around their South Shore neighborhood.

“He must have just told him,” Jones said as she watched the man crying on their lawn. Jones’ grandson, Amere Deese, 14, was the youngest of five people killed in three mass shootings in Chicago on Sunday and Monday.

Amere died Sunday night in an attack that killed two others and left a teenage boy with a gunshot wound to the leg in the Chatham neighborhood. Earlier that afternoon, a shooting on the Far North Side cut short a trip by two sisters to Chicago, leaving one of them dead. The next night, a dispute near the Dan Ryan Expressway in Grand Crossing escalated to a shooting that left one dead and three more wounded, Chicago police said.

The separate mass shootings on consecutive days occurred during an unseasonably warm February several months earlier than the traditional start of the city’s typically higher crime summer season.

CPD’s Chief of Detectives Antoinette Ursitti said she was confident police would find and charge those responsible for the shootings.

“I think everyone can get a sense that these investigations are off to a very strong start,” Ursitti told reporters at an unrelated Tuesday news conference. “We believe that we are moving in the right direction, and our detectives in each of those areas are going to continue to investigate those cases with as much diligence.”

Jones, 52, said Amere died just as he had begun to emerge from a shell he’d donned following the death of his mother, Brittani. She died of cirrhosis of the liver almost two years ago and Amere and three of his sisters had stayed with Jones and her fiance since then, she said.

Jones said her grandson had struggled after his mother’s death. But, she continued, “he started to turn himself around” since the beginning of this school year.

“He never was a mean kid but when his mom passed, he put his shell on,” she said. “He started to open up and realize we were here for him.” He had returned to a youth mentorship and guidance program after a long hiatus and started attending school more, even making the honor roll at the O’Keeffe School of Excellence the previous semester, Jones said.

It all came after Amere spent 10 days detained after being a passenger in a stolen vehicle, Jones said. He’d called her three days into his detention.

“He said, ‘Grandma, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have (done) what I did; I’ll do better,’” she said.

Jones and Amere’s probation officer were planning a trip for him to see six colleges “to show him different things, a different way of living,” she said.

Amere hadn’t been to the home on the 8000 block of South Vincennes Avenue where he was shot in several months, she said: “That part of his life was over.”

Hours before Amere and three others died, Keyonce and KeiLaysia Gladney of Minnesota were listening to music, watching their friends play basketball and thinking about getting something to eat in Pottawatomie Park, 7340 N. Rogers Ave., when someone in a ski mask approached and started shooting.

Keyonce, 19, was shot in the chest and died. KeiLaysia, 22, suffered a gunshot wound to her foot. Police said two young men, ages 19 and 20, were also shot and taken to Ascension St. Francis Hospital in Evanston in good condition.

“It was such a nice day,” KeiLaysia Gladney recalled Monday night. “We were all just hanging out. The sun was out.”

Then shots were fired.

Ald. Maria Hadden, 49th, said in a statement the shooting in Rogers Park was targeted. Detectives are investigating and no one was in custody as of Monday night, police said. The department announced on social media that it would hold an emergency assistance clinic at the park where the shooting took place from 3 to 7 p.m. Wednesday.

The sisters’ father, Courtney Gladney, who grew up in Englewood and now lives in Iowa, went to the west suburban hotel where his daughter was staying alongside relatives from Minnesota and the south suburbs to help manage his daughter’s death arrangements and medical care.

Although it wasn’t Keyonce Gladney’s first visit to the Chicago area — she’d stayed with her grandmother in south suburban Richton Park on other visits — Courtney said he wouldn’t have let his daughter come to Chicago had he known of her plans.

“I didn’t want her here,” he said. “I’m from here. So I know. I wouldn’t have let her do it.”

Keyonce Gladney had just graduated from high school and was working two jobs at a dry cleaner and as a home care assistant, said her mother Tanecsha Jones. She was close with her siblings and with God, and planned to study to become a paramedic, Jones said.

She liked to do her hair, go on TikTok, and take photos, her father added. Mostly, he said, his daughter was a positive person with a big smile and “so many goals, it was something new every day.”

In South Shore on Tuesday, Cynthia Jones gazed at her grandson’s most recent set of school pictures. Some showed Amere in a cap and gown. She mentioned how her daughter would have loved to see him walk the stage for his eighth grade graduation, as well as his high school and college graduations down the road.

Amere had “quite a few people standing behind him” at O’Keeffe, she said. That support had finally begun to pay off, she continued: “He just had to figure out that no one is going to hurt him.”

She is thinking about moving her family to the northwest suburbs to protect her granddaughters.

For now, she said, she is thinking about the last conversation she had with Amere. She’d reminded him that she loved him and told him to be safe and he had responded in kind, she said.

And she is thinking about “the young men who did that to him.”

“I’m praying that they find solace with God and do the right thing,” she said. “I’m praying that they turn it around.”

Ed Watkins, another resident at Jones’ building, left later that afternoon with red eyes. He’d known Amere and his family for years, he said, and had watched him grow up. People had been pulling for the boy as he struggled through the loss of his mom, he said.

“All these warnings, all these hands,” Watkins said. “It hurts.”

Chicago Tribune’s Sam Charles contributed.