Road rage is believed to be what led to a shooting that left an off-duty Chicago officer injured Tuesday afternoon in the city's Irving Park neighborhood, authorities say.
The shooting occurred shortly after 3:15 p.m. near the intersection of West Addison Street and North Elston Avenue, following what CPD Supt. David Brown described as a rear-end collision.
The officer was rushed to Illinois Masonic Medical Center where her injuries have been described as "serious but not life-threatening."
Officers from suburban Lincolnwood are also assisting with the investigation.
Meanwhile, a massive police search is underway in Hollywood Park, with K-9 units on the ground and officers searching between homes in a hunt for a suspect in the shooting, according to NBC's Sky 5 helicopter crew.
Police have taped off a large swath of street in the area around the site of the initial shooting, and officers remain on the scene. Elston is closed in both directions between Addison and Kimball as police investigate the shooting.
A second scene was also reported by police near Lawrence Avenue and the Kennedy Expressway, where both the entrance and exit ramps onto the outbound side of the highway were closed as part of the investigation.
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No official suspect information has been made immediately available.
Brown spoke to the frequency of road rage incidents in Chicago and how access to firearms has escalated violence.
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"We've had other regular residents of this city either beat up or assaulted during a road rage, but also we've seen gunplay in road rage incidents here. And really everywhere across this country, personal conflicts have ended more and more with escalating violence," Brown said.
In Tuesday's shooting, Chicago's top cop said the officer was shot after her vehicle was rear-ended and pushed by the suspect in the case, but Chicago Police News Affairs later clarified that the officer hit the vehicle after the driver of the SUV "abruptly stopped." Then, someone inside opened fire, striking the off-duty officer in the face.
Chicago was recently the site of a deadly road rage incident when a 36-year-old man was fatally stabbed during an altercation in the city's River North neighborhood in the early evening of Aug. 23.
In July, a 24-year-old woman was critically injured after she was shot six times in a road rage incident on I-57 near Vollmer Road in the south suburbs.
