A woman was charged after her small child stepped onto a school bus and told the driver that she shot a roommate during a dispute this week over dirty dishes, officials said.
Jelavonni Gage, 26, faces felony charges of attempted murder and aggravated battery in connection to the shooting Wednesday morning at her home in the 8100 block of Maryland Avenue in Chatham on the South Side.
During Gage’s initial court appearance, her attorney said she acted in “self-defense” after the roommate first pointed a gun at her. But Assistant State’s Attorney Paul Sloan said the attack was “unprovoked,” alleging that Gage “lost her temper” and started beating her roommate during a minor quarrel.
“When that wasn’t enough, she shot the victim,” Sloan said. “This was very merciless and callous.”
Prosecutors said Gage flew into a rage when she asked her roommate to wash the dishes and the 35-year-old woman put it off until later. After Gage started slamming doors and making “insulting remarks,” the roommate said she and her four kids were leaving for the day, prosecutors said.
Gage then pulled out a gun and threatened to “shoot her in front of her kids,” prosecutors said. That led to a fight that the roommate’s cousin tried to break up.
Gage eventually grabbed the gun and shot the roommate in her stomach in front of one of her own children, prosecutors said.
Gage then grabbed her kids, ages 3 and 4, and took them to their nursery school bus, according to a police report. One of them reported the shooting to the driver, who took them back home.
Gage was arrested there, but police didn’t find a gun, prosecutors said.
The roommate was taken to University of Chicago Medical Center in critical condition, police said. Her condition was stabilized after she underwent surgery.
Gage’s lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Claire Bullington, offered a “different course of events” in court on Friday.
Gage had given the roommate and her children a place to stay “out of the kindness of her own heart,” Bullington said, adding that the onetime friends had met at a domestic violence shelter three years earlier.
During the initial argument about the dishes, Bullington said Gage’s roommate started pushing her client. Bullington said Gage then called 911 to have her roommate removed from the home, and the roommate started aiming a gun at her.
Gage had a pending domestic battery case at the time of the shooting, court records show.
Judge James Costello ordered Gage detained pending trial, finding she was a danger to the roommate and “anyone else who gets her temper out of line.”