A woman says she feels lucky to be alive, but will always bear the physical and emotional scars of being shot during an attempted carjacking in Chicago’s West Garfield Park neighborhood Wednesday morning.
According to Chicago police, 40-year-old Lequita Sims was one of two people shot during the attack in the first block of North Kostner just before 5 a.m. Wednesday.
“I was just scared for my life,” she said. “I thought I was dead at the time.”
According to police, Sims and a 65-year-old man were inside a vehicle when four armed men exited a silver SUV and approached them.
The man Sims was with pulled out a weapon and fired shots at the assailants. One of the suspects returned fire, striking Sims in the chest and the 65-year-old man in the right calf.
The suspects then fled the scene, and Sims was rushed to a hospital.
The bullet is still in her chest, with doctors telling her that removing it would be extremely dangerous.
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“I was trying to raise my arm up. I saw blood just running down my arm,” she said.
Sims told NBC Chicago that she was getting a ride to work from a coworker when the vicious assault took place.
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“I was like ‘what’s going on? What’s going on?’ And that’s when they started shooting,” she said.
She says that the experience has forever changed her, and she’s afraid to go back home to the West Side, preferring to stay with her mother in suburban Lombard.
“I’m in pain every day,” she said. “I’m having flashbacks. They took my life away from me.”
The suspects in the shooting are also wanted in a host of other violent armed robberies in recent days, more than a dozen in all, according to an alert from Chicago police.
There have been no arrests made, and the family’s pastor is calling for justice.
“There are terrorists, right in our neighborhoods,” Terrell Stevens said. “You know who they are. They look like you. They have your last name. They sound like you, they dress like you. It’s time for you to turn someone in.”
