A sisters’ trip to Chicago on a warm February weekend ended in tragedy as their family from Minnesota, Iowa and the south suburbs converged at a west suburban hotel room Monday to manage the sisters’ death arrangements and medical care.
Keyonce and KeiLaysia Gladney of Minnesota were listening to music, watching their friends play basketball and thinking about getting something to eat on the unseasonably warm Sunday afternoon 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, was shot in the foot. Chicago police said two young men, ages 19 and 20, were also shot and taken to St. Francis Hospital in good condition.
“It was such a nice day,” recalled KeiLaysia on Monday night. “We were all just hanging out. The sun was out.”
Then gunshots rang out.
Ald. Maria Hadden, 49th, said in a statement the shooting in Rogers Park was targeted. Detectives are investigating the shooting 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, said he grew up in Englewood. He lives in Iowa now. Although it wasn’t Keyonce’s first visit to Chicago — she’d stayed with her grandmother in Richton Park on other visits — he 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 had just graduated from high school and was working two jobs at a dry cleaners and as a home care assistant, said her mother Tanecsha Jones. She was close with her siblings and with God, and planned to go to school 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.”
The shooting was the first of three mass shootings in Chicago over the next two days. Later Sunday, three people were killed, including a 14-year-old boy, after a shooting in Chatham Sunday night, police said. On Monday, a man died and three more injured after a “dispute” in the south side Grand Crossing neighborhood escalated to shooting Monday evening, Chicago police said.
