CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Chicago police detectives are trying to figure out who killed a recent University of Chicago graduate on the street Tuesday afternoon in the Hyde Park neighborhood.
Police said the 24-year-old man was on the sidewalk in the 900 block of East 54th Place when a car pulled up shortly before 2 p.m. and a gunman got out and demanded the man’s property.
Witnesses told officers the 24-year-old man struggled with the robber and a shot went off, according to preliminary information from the scene. The man was hit in the chest and taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center down the street, where he was pronounced dead.
Police said the robber got back in the car, which fled west on 54th Place. It was not clear whether he even took anything.
“It’s not regular,” Hyde Park resident John Okafo told CBS 2. “You don’t just shoot someone on the chest; for what? A phone? What is equivalence of life? So it just doesn’t add up to me.”
The shooting incident really shook the neighborhood on Tuesday.
“It’s right outside my apartment, so it’s scary,” a U of C student told CBS 2. “I walk down here every day.”
Another Hyde Park resident told CBS-2 how shocking it is for a murder to happen in his neighborhood.
“It’s pretty safe here, so this is a very, very surprising thing to us,” the resident said.
Besides being near the center of the University of Chicago’s campus, the shooting took place about a block away from a public elementary school.
About two hours earlier, just blocks away, businesses and cars were damaged by gunfire. The shots were fired from a Hyundai Sonata at about 12:10 p.m. at 53rd Street and South Harper Avenue, according to a security alert from the University of Chicago.
No injuries were reported, but several cars and two businesses were damaged by gunfire, the alert said. The Sonata had been reported stolen Monday, according to the alert.
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(WBBM Newsradio and the Sun-Times Media Wire contributed to this copy.)