14-year-old boy critically wounded in West Ridge shooting

A teen was shot in West Ridge Friday afternoon, Chicago police said.

A 14-year-old boy was on the sidewalk in the 6300 block of North Rockwell Street about 3 p.m. when he was shot in the neck by an unknown offender, police said.

He was taken to Lurie Children’s Hospital in critical condition, police said.

Mohammad Rafiq Mohammad Yasin, 36, lives a block away from the boy.

Yasin, who has lived in the community for over a decade and says he knows the boy’s family, said he heard three gunshots.

“After that, somebody yelled in my language like ‘Help.’ It’s a young kid yelling, ‘Help,’ and also he was calling someone in Rohingya, and I come down and I saw him. He was just running, you know, back and forward in this area, [and then I] saw that another young kid was lying down on the floor.

“It’s really sad to see,” said Yasin, who spotted the boy with someone else at the time of the shooting.

“As a refugee, we came from Malaysia. We’ve been going through a lot of things. We seek a new life in the United States of America,” he said. “We came here and want more opportunity for our kids and all that, so now suddenly we see the situation [here] is really bad.”

In 2025, West Ridge was listed among the safest Chicago community areas for shooting incidents. The neighborhood ranked 58th out of the city’s 77 communities for population-adjusted shooting rate, according to data from the Chicago Public Safety DataHub.

The rate in West Ridge was 13 shootings per 100,000 people, while the citywide average was 42.

Data from this year, last updated in August, shows West Ridge ranked 48th for shootings.

Farzad Chowdhury, 21, has also lived in the area for over a decade. He didn’t hear the shooting, but saw police cars “flying by” on his way home from school.

Chowdhury noticed police looking at a blue vehicle two blocks from his home.

“They told me he was involved with a shooting,” he said. “I feel so terrible for the person,” he said. [It’s like] you are so young.”

Area 3 detectives are investigating.