Minorities Targeted in Chicago Area Drivebys

Firing one handgun while he reloaded a second, a white man drove through residential neighborhoods northwest of the city late Friday, shooting first at Orthodox Jews walking home from temple, then at an African American man and his two children and finally at an Asian American couple.

The black man, former Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong, was killed by a bullet that struck him in the back and tore through his aorta. Six Jews were wounded during their Sabbath. The Asian American couple, fired on in their car when they tried to pass the gunman’s vehicle, escaped injury.

Police, who began tying the shootings together early Saturday morning when witness after witness described the same 20-something white male in a late-model blue Ford Taurus, stopped short of calling the 58-minute, 12-mile shooting spree a series of hate crimes.

They still needed to interview the wounded Jews, authorities said late Saturday, all of whom were in good condition. But, adhering to their tradition of dedicating the Sabbath to worship, the Jews declined to speak with detectives until after sundown.

“We’re not saying it’s not a hate crime,” said Chicago Police Department spokesman Patrick Camden. “What we’re saying is, at this particular moment in the investigation, the elements for a hate crime are not there.”

Others had no question about the motive.

“This was an outrageous, despicable act of hate,” said Richard Hirschhaut, of the Anti-Defamation League in Chicago. “And law enforcement will ultimately call it a hate crime.”

As at least 40 investigators from three Chicago area agencies and the FBI combed the neighborhoods and strung up yellow crime-scene tape, Justice Department officials in Washington said that they will review the case to see if the shootings might fall under federal hate crime laws.

The shootings began shortly after 8 p.m. Friday in the Rogers Park neighborhood, a racially diverse area of this city that is home to both Chicago’s Orthodox Jewish community and immigrants from the Caribbean, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Since many Orthodox Jews do not drive during the Sabbath, dozens were strolling home from several area synagogues, many of the men wearing traditional black suits and wide-brimmed black hats. Others wore yarmulkes.

A white man with close-cropped hair drove slowly into the neighborhood, circling a two-block area, police said.

His first stop was in the 2900 block of West Estes Avenue, where he shot a man in the shoulder. He then drove around the corner and two minutes later shot another man in the buttock.

Over the next 13 minutes, police said, the gunman continued circling the two-block area, sometimes stopping his car and climbing out to fire a half-dozen rounds, other times firing from inside his car. He wounded three more men and a 15-year-old boy.

After emptying a .22-caliber handgun, the gunman would switch to a .380-caliber semiautomatic pistol, police said.

Michael Messing, a physician who lives in the neighborhood, was standing in his frontyard talking to neighbors when the gunman pulled to the curb, jumped out and began firing at him from 30 feet away. The shots missed, Messing said, and as he watched, the gunman hopped back into the car, drove down the block and began shooting at another man. The man dropped, and Messing rushed to give him medical care until paramedics arrived.

“We’re still in shock,” Messing said. “It’s like a videotape going over and over in your head.”

About 12 minutes after he drove slowly out of Rogers Park, police said, the gunman arrived in Skokie and pulled up behind the 43-year-old Byrdsong, who coached the Northwestern basketball team for four seasons in the mid-1990s. Byrdsong, who had recently been working as an insurance agent, was walking with two of his four children, police said.

The Byrdsongs were three blocks from their house in the mostly white neighborhood when the gunman opened fire, shooting seven rounds from his .22-caliber weapon. One hit Byrdsong in the lower back. He died four hours later while undergoing surgery. Neither child was struck.

“This was a random act,” Skokie Police Lt. Barry Silverberg said of Byrdsong’s slaying. “He was at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Twenty-eight minutes later and two miles away in the community of Northbrook, the same man apparently fired five shots into a car driven by an Asian American couple, police said. The couple described the same blue sedan and the same man--and that is when police began wondering if six shootings in Rogers Park, one in Skokie and one in Northbrook might be related.

By Saturday afternoon, authorities said that indeed they were related and released a composite sketch of the suspect: a light-skinned man about 6 feet, cleanshaven with close-cropped dark brown hair.

In addition to witness descriptions, police said, ballistics tests indicated that the .22 shell casings found near where Byrdsong was shot matched those recovered near the shootings of Jewish victims.

In 1997, the most recent statistics available, 8,049 hate crimes were reported, according to the FBI. Of those, nearly 60% were motivated by racial bias and 10% by bias against ethnicity or national origin.

Times staff writer Eric Lichtblau in Washington contributed to this story.