Mayra Solis, her husband and two children were traveling home from a long-awaited family reunion Thursday evening when she said her husband was unexpectedly shot on a Chicago expressway, spending his final breaths telling the children in the backseat to take cover.
In an emotional interview with NBC Chicago just hours after Solis, who is pregnant, lost her partner, she described the tragic moments of the night.
The family, including an 11-year-old girl and 3-year-old child, was heading home from a relative's house after Solis' husband, 28-year-old Humberto Marin-Garcia, was reunited with his grandmother during her visit from Mexico, the first time he had seen her in nearly a decade, Solis said.
"We spent a couple hours there. On our way back, like a normal drive, we got on the highway. ... After three blocks, I would say, I heard like something exploded," Solis said. "At first, I thought it was a wheel. And when I turned around, my baby's sitting on her car seat and I looked at the window and it was shattered. And I'm like, 'OK, she's OK.'"
At that point, Solis said her husband was screaming, "telling my oldest to bend down."
"My daughter grabbed her little sister off the car seat and covered her and I thought we were OK until I noticed that he lost control, the car started going to the right," she said.
As the car veered toward the concrete barrier, Solis had to quickly jump into action.
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"If it wasn't that I noticed, we would have flipped," she said. "I was able to get the wheel and control it, put it in parking. And then when I turned around and I checked him, he wasn't breathing anymore. He was dead already. I called the ambulance, but it was too late."
Solis said there were no road rage incidents leading up to the shooting.
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"It all happened so fast," she said.
Police said an investigation is underway. The shooting, which took place at 9:30 p.m. in the northbound lanes of Interstate 55 near Ashland Avenue, led to the shutdown of the expressway for nearly six hours.
Photos and video from the scene show a large police presence in the northbound lanes as officers canvassed the entire highway and searched for evidence.
According to police, the victim's pregnant wife was riding in the passenger seat of the vehicle when the shooting occurred. Though she was not wounded in the shooting, she was taken to a nearby hospital for evaluation, police said.
Solis described her husband as a hardworking man who owned a hardwood flooring business.
She decried the violence that took his life, and the lives of many, Friday.
"This is happening every day," she said. "And especially to innocent people that don't deserve it like my husband."
