Sep 1, 2008 10:33 pm US/Central
13-Year-Old Girl Shot On West Side Dies
Eternity Gaddy Shot In Head While Outside With Family
CHICAGO (CBS) ―
A family that should already be back home in Allentown, Pa., is still in Chicago, preparing to bury a young teenager shot dead by gang bangers on a Humboldt Park street.
Thirteen-year-old Eternity Gaddy, who was shot early Sunday while standing with her mother and cousins outside her great-aunt's home on the West Side has died.
Eternity's mother leaned on friends Monday as she dealt with the grief of losing her teenaged daughter. The girl had joined her mom outside to say goodbye to a friend when a car pulled up and two men opened fire.
"What I thought was firecrackers was actually gunshots," said her mother, Marilyn Hernandez Castro. "And when I turned this way to tell her to run she was already on the ground. And I just threw myself on her and started screaming and telling her to fight for her life and she kept gasping for air."
Eternity was shot in the head. She hung on for a day before dying in the hospital Monday morning.
"My beautiful baby is gone,'' her great-aunt, Ruthie Zayas, who lives on the 3400 block of West Potomac, where the shooting occurred, said over the weekend.
"All of the sudden, I hear boom, boom, boom,'' Eternity's cousin, 21-year-old Amanda Rodriguez, said.
Everyone thought they were firecrackers and ran. Rodriguez got back to her cousin's side.
"She took a deep breath. A tear came out. And it was over," Rodriguez said. "It is crazy. That's what I think. And I don't know what ... to do. I saw my cousin die in front of me.''
The young girl who loved to sing lived in Pennsylvania and was planning on returning this weekend in order to escape Chicago's violence was shot just hours before she was to board a bus to go home.
"Eternity was my goddaughter," said Adrienne Akindele. "I don't have any kids but that was the only child that I had and now she's gone. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't. Find the killer.
Hernandez Castro appealed directly to the shooters.
"You killed my 13-year-old little girl, my angel that that had nothing to do with anything that you thought we were walking down this alley doing," she said. "Ii hope you find it in your heart to turn yourself in."
Hernandez Castro donated her daughter's heart and seven other organs so that possibly as many as eight lives can be saved. She said it's something her daughter would have wanted.
The news rattled the block -- but for some, it was mostly because the victim is a child. Gunfire is so common that one mother said she does not go out after dark with her children for fear of gang members who "sneak out of gangways.''
Just Friday, Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis -- in an attempt to remind parents and guardians about curfew laws -- pointed out just how dangerous the streets get after dark. Since the beginning of the year, 63 juveniles have been shot after curfew. Eight of those shootings were fatal.
"When the night hits, it's a different world out here,'' a neighbor on Potomac said. "Monsters come out.''
Ruthie Zayas first moved to Allentown, Pa., 14 years ago after visiting and noticing tidy town houses and clean blocks. She knew that gang violence was eventually going to greet her infant son on Chicago's streets and decided to leave. Zayas' niece and Eternity's mother, Marilyn Castro, followed her.
Zayas decided to return to Chicago at the end of last year. Eternity and her siblings came with her briefly and then returned to Allentown until three months ago, when she, her younger brothers and sister -- ages 7, 8 and 10 -- and Castro, 29, came back to Chicago.
"I should have never come back,'' Zayas said.
Chicago Police are reviewing surveillance tapes taken from the building. The incident is believed to be gang-related based on gang slogans that witnesses heard before the shooting.
Wednesday night at 6:30 there will be a march against violence beginning at the same spot where Eternity took her last ones Sunday morning.
CBS 2's Mike Puccinelli and the STNG Wire contributed to this report.
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