Teba Stewart stood in the center of a group of friends and family in the sparkling sun late Tuesday afternoon at the former Cabrini-Green apartment site and spoke of a cardboard cutout of her son, Ashawn Davis.
Ashawn, 13, was shot and killed late Sunday night in the Edgewater area. Stewart, standing among bunches of light blue balloons and family dressed in blue and white, said she just wanted her son back.
“Oh, man, what am I going to do?” Stewart said. “I know you didn’t deserve this.”
Brian Baillie, Ashawn’s flag football coach, stood next to the circle. Ashawn, the team’s quarterback, was “very intelligent,” he said, and a quiet leader.
“He did it in a really quiet, kind of stoic way,” Baillie said. “He was more of an example than rallying the troops.”
“He was just a good, fun kid to be around,” he said.
Stewart said Ashawn was “a loving person” who cherished her two older sisters, ages 15 and 18. His favorite car was a Dodge Hellcat and he was a “TikTok King” who loved music and dancing, she said.
She last spoke to him when “he was coming home,” she said. She had planned to travel for her 37th birthday and wanted him to meet her before she left.
According to a police report obtained through a Freedom of Information request, officers found Ashawn with a gunshot wound to the eye. A witness told police she heard a single gunshot and saw three young men run out of the apartment where Ashawn was found. Another witness told police he heard the three young men say Ashawn had accidentally shot himself, according to the report.
The Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office did not release a cause of death for the boy following an autopsy Tuesday.
The building where police were seen coming in and out Monday morning has seen a spate of shootings over the summer, and neighbors said it had been a magnet for fights, shootings and other political activity for years.
According to police, no one was in custody in connection with the shooting and area detectives were investigating.
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