East Side community mourns 19-year-old Sierra Evans and wonders if ShotSpotter could have saved her

Babies cried and dogs barked on the other side of a fence where Sierra Evans was fatally shot last weekend. Adults gathered around the crime scene and sobbed into each other’s arms. Children, far too young to understand the gravity of the vigil, yelped as white wax dripped from candles onto their hands.

Blue star and silver heart balloons swayed above the crowd; a single “I love you” balloon soared in their midst.

Following prayers and chants for justice, everyone counted to 19 and then released the balloons in the air.

That’s how old Evans was when she was fatally shot in an East Side alleyway late Friday night or early Saturday morning. A neighbor didn’t find her body until 9 a.m., and police arrived a half hour later.

Her family is seeking answers.

“The day that she was killed, it was so black that nobody seen nothing of who did it because there was no streetlight right there,” her stepfather, Carlos Abrams, told 10th Ward Ald. Peter Chico, pointing to a busted overhead lamp.

Chico nodded and took a photo of it, but both men believed ShotSpotter would have provided Evan’s family with the most closure.

“If ShotSpotter was on that night, we probably wouldn’t have been able to save her, but at least we would have found out where it was and we could have found out who it was or where the shots came from,” Abrams, 46, said.

Residents concerned over discontinuation of ShotSpotter: ‘How will the police know where all the shootings are?’

Last month, aldermen had overwhelmingly voted in favor of keeping the technology system, but Mayor Brandon Johnson, who campaigned on ending the city’s use of the technology, vetoed it, arguing it doesn’t work well enough to justify its cost.

Johnson terminated the city’s contract with the gunshot detection technology days before Evans was killed.

“Her lying here in the alley for eight, nine hours is unacceptable. It’s inhumane,” Chico, a former police officer who vocally opposed plans to deactivate the technology, told the Tribune. “If ShotSpotter wasn’t released, it would have alerted the police to get here much more quickly.”

Mourners hold candles as they comfort each other during a vigil for Sierra Evans in an alley near the 9500 block of South Avenue N on Oct. 2, 2024, in Chicago. (John J. Kim/Chicago Tribune)

The recent high school graduate, who had dreams of becoming a hairdresser, had just started working at UPS, loading packages into trucks, and was saving up to start her own beauty salon.

Tina Evans couldn’t help but crack a smile between sniffles as she recalled how her daughter would obsess over her hair for hours.

“I was her guinea pig,” said Evans, 39. “She would say, ‘I want to do this to your hair. I want to do that to your hair.’ And I was like, ‘Let’s go!’”

The mother nodded emphatically as her daughter’s self-described childhood best friend Esperanza Garnica, 19, characterized Sierra Evans as “a ride-or-die type of friend.”

“If you needed her, she was there. She was there,” Garnica said. And many believed Evans was still with them in some way at Wednesday’s vigil.

“It’s Sisi! It’s Sisi,” her loved ones exclaimed as they pointed to an S-like formation that the balloons made as they traveled north with the warm early autumn breeze.