A woman shot in a leg while getting a ride to her South Side home.
A mother and son who dodged bullets as they tried to thwart a car break-in.
Another woman who, after her car was stolen, learned it had been used in a shooting, with a bullet cracking its windshield and shell casings on the floor.
Each of their stories has the same twist: The same Glock handgun was used in all three crimes.
That happened even though that gun was supposed to have been destroyed.
The .45-caliber Glock 21 had been turned in at a Chicago Police Department gun buyback event at St. Sabina Church in December 2023.
But, instead of being shredded at a Pilsen scrap yard, as it should have been along with other guns from the buyback, it ended up being stolen from a roomful of cops at the Gresham District police station on the South Side.
A year later, the police recovered the gun after chasing down a 16-year-old boy they said they saw pulling car door handles in South Shore. Officers said the teenager dropped the gun as they closed in on him.
Last month, the Illinois Answers Project and the Chicago Sun-Times reported on the stolen gun and how — 16 months later — the police appeared to have made little progress in finding out who stole it or how a type of gun notoriously used in street violence wound up in the hands of a teenage boy.
Now, newly obtained police records show, it turns out that the gun is known to have been used in three violent crimes after it was stolen from the police station.
When reporters told the woman who was wounded that the gun had been in the custody of the police and should have been destroyed, she said she was “devastated.”
“I can’t believe it would get back out there to ruin somebody’s life,” the woman, 53, said outside her home, speaking on the condition of anonymity out of fear for her safety.
No one has been charged in the three crimes, records show. A police sergeant who supervised the gun buyback was suspended for a day.
The police department wouldn’t answer questions about the shootings linked to the Glock or the investigations into its disappearance.
A police spokesperson said the department “has implemented additional safeguards to ensure firearms recovered during gun turn-ins are properly inventoried,” including additional oversight.
At a news conference last month, police Supt. Larry Snelling downplayed the theft and said detectives were investigating.
Snelling did not mention that the police had tied the gun to three crimes between its theft and eventual recovery. The detectives investigating those three crimes were apparently not told about the gun’s recovery when it was found.
“When you look at the number of guns that have been turned in, this is one case that is under investigation at this point,” Snelling said. “Once we get to the bottom of the investigation, if there’s anything nefarious that we find, we’ll take action.”
‘I just got shot’
Shortly after midnight last Aug. 14, a woman and her boyfriend were parking near her home in the 8100 block of South Morgan Street after a night of delivering food orders in the suburbs.
Someone fired toward their Buick sport utility vehicle, hitting it three times and shattering a passenger-side window. One of the bullets ripped through the front passenger door and struck the woman in her right thigh.
“We heard two things hit the car, sound like bricks — boom, boom,” she said. “I felt something in my leg, like burning. So I touched it and was like, ‘Oh, my God, I think I just got shot.’ ”
Two patched bullet holes can be seen on the front passenger door of a woman’s Buick sport utility vehicle as a result of a shooting last Aug. 14 in which she was shot and wounded. That was one of a series of crimes carried out with a Glock handgun that had been stolen from the Gresham District police station.
Tom Schuba / Sun-Times
After the shooting, her boyfriend drove her a few blocks away to report the crime at the Gresham District station — from which the Glock had been stolen.
At the scene of the shooting, officers collected seven bullet casings. Through this evidence, investigators eventually linked the shooting to the two later crimes — the shots fired during the car break-in and the stolen car found with shell casings inside.
The woman said she still has a bullet in her thigh and that doctors have told her it will “work its way out” naturally. But she now has trouble walking and uses crutches and a wheelchair.
The woman said she moved after the shooting and mostly stays at home with her mother in the south suburbs.
“Why would someone want to harm me?” she said. “That’s how I feel.”
A close call
Crystal Reynolds was at home relaxing with a cocktail when she heard glass break the evening of last Sept. 19.
Reynolds, 44, said she looked outside her third-story apartment in the 7800 block of South Cornell Avenue and saw the rear passenger window of her Kia SUV had been busted out.
The SUV’s alarm and remote lock wouldn’t work. So she and her son, Andre Williams, 26, went down to investigate.
Two young men bolted from the SUV, and Williams immediately looked at their hands. He had witnessed shootings and been shot at before, so it was natural to look for a weapon. That’s when he saw one of the young men had a gun and pushed his mother out of the way as the shooting started.
A bullet pinged the metal gate to their apartment. Another splintered the molding of their building’s wooden doorframe, nearly hitting Reynolds.
“Thank God, by the grace of God, that it didn’t hit any of us,” Reynolds said.
Like the woman who had been shot in the thigh, the mother and son were surprised to learn the gun that was fired at them was previously in police custody.
“I think that they should definitely do an investigation” of the Gresham District, Williams said. “How many more guns have been stolen or are moving around [that are] still out on the streets that we don’t know about yet? Until maybe someone gets shot, or it gets recovered from, like, a dead teen who got shot by the cops?”
‘Inside job’?
Another woman walked in to the Gresham District station on Oct. 5 and reported that her Hyundai had been stolen from the 7900 block of South Carpenter Street.
It was found on the same street eight days later — with what appeared to be a bullet hole through the windshield. She said officers discovered shell casings inside, and she later found another they had missed.
“Once they told me that they found bullet casings, I already knew … that they used my car to do a shootout,” said the woman, 33, who asked to remain anonymous because she fears for her safety.
She’s thankful she and her kids weren’t harmed and that her car wasn’t totaled. But she wasn’t shocked that it was taken, given that car thefts are common, and some Hyundais are easy to steal.
Still, she questions how a gun could disappear from a police station and then be used in a string of crimes.
“Is that an inside job to get it back on the street?” she said.
Case closed
Police didn’t recover the Glock until early Nov. 30, when officers chased down the teenage boy who was seen pulling car door handles.
In an interview with reporters earlier this year, the teenager wouldn’t say where he got it. Now 17, he pleaded guilty on April 22 to illegally possessing the gun as a juvenile. He isn’t being named because he was a minor when he was arrested.
Cook County Judge Sanju Oommen Green did not impose a sentence because the teen already had pleaded guilty earlier in April to an unrelated burglary. In that case, he was sentenced to 100 hours of community service and two years of probation, with his first three months under electronic home monitoring.
The judge ordered him released from the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center, where he had been held since he was arrested for burglarizing a car in Calumet City on March 18. His mother didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The judge warned that a probation violation could land the boy in a tougher spot — an Illinois Department of Juvenile Justice youth center, which she called a “prison for kids.”
“Good luck,” she said.
Glock gone missing
The Glock had stood out from the other guns turned over to police at the buyback at St. Sabina Church on Dec. 2, 2023.
Guns recovered at buyback events are often old or inoperable when their owners swap them for gift cards. But the Glock grabbed the attention of officers inventorying the buyback guns at the Gresham District station.
“I looked at it briefly, like, ‘Aw, yeah, it’s a nice one,’” a tactical officer told an internal affairs investigator, according to a recording of the interview obtained by the Illinois Answers Project and the Sun-Times.
It soon vanished from the tactical team office inside the station, putting a type of gun that’s routinely found at crime scenes back on the street.
More than 8,000 Glock pistols were recovered in Chicago between 2017 and 2021, thousands more than the next most popular firearm, according to a lawsuit the city of Chicago filed last year against the Austrian gunmaker.
No alert to detectives
Nearly two weeks after the teenager was arrested with the Glock, a sergeant in the police forensics unit wrote in a memo that a federal database used to analyze and share gun evidence had connected the weapon to recent crimes — the shooting on 81st and Morgan, the shots fired near 79th and Cornell and the casings recovered from the car stolen from 79th and Carpenter.
Typically, detectives investigating shootings tied to a single gun would be notified when it is recovered. But, in this case, no one appears to have created or shared a “ballistic information alert” — a document that notifies investigators when a gun is found to have been used at multiple crime scenes.
It doesn’t appear that the detectives investigating the shootings involving the Glock were told when it was found, though the department’s Bureau of Internal Affairs and the detective investigating the gun’s theft were notified on Dec. 11.
In a memo that same day, a federal investigator discussed the gun’s journey.
“Just an ‘interesting’ note on this firearm recovery,” an official with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives wrote to three colleagues on Dec. 11. “This firearm was part of a St. Sabina Weapon Turn In event back in December 2023 … But was ‘lost’ at the event at some point. Then it was used in a few shootings and recovered again…”
The memo ends with a single word:
“Yikes.”
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Peter Nickeas and Casey Toner report for the Illinois Answers Project. Tom Schuba is a Sun-Times reporter.
Contributing: Rosemary Sobol