Errant Gunfire on Chicago Street Claims Young Woman's Life

Chicago’s gunslingers claimed another innocent life last weekend, a young woman caught unaware on a city street, struck dead by an errant bullet.

Aaren O’Connor was 25 years old. A San Diego native, she’d moved to Chicago for love, to be near the boyfriend she met while studying in Japan. She got a job at a Japanese toy company, Tomy, with offices in suburban Oak Brook.

Friday night, while sitting in her car in the 2000 block of West 21st Street in the Heart of Chicago neighborhood after getting home from work, a bullet struck Aaren in the head as she spoke with her family back home on the phone.

“It’s just absolutely the worst time of my life,” her father, David O’Connor, told NBC Chicago.

When his child told him she was moving to Chicago, Dad worried. “Fearful,” is the word he used. He pleaded with her not to go.

Chicago’s reputation for neighborhood violence, known around the world, is well earned. The city is on pace for its most murderous February in recent memory. But his daughter had to follow her heart. And for 18 months, she made a life for herself here, commuting to Oak Brook for work, making friends.

But the random, pervasive gunfire on Chicago’s streets reached from the Heart of Chicago through her cellphone and broke the heart of a father.

Aaren didn’t realize what had happened to her. Neither did her dad.

“She kept saying repeatedly, ‘My head hurts, my head hurts,’” David O’Connor recalls.

Those were her last words.

“I just wish I could have told her that I knew what was going on and I could have told her one more time that I love her and that I’m so proud of her,” her dad told NBC. “She was an amazing girl.”

She lingered in critical condition at Stroger Hospital for two days.

“I knew right away that we lost our baby.”

The last publicly viewable image on her Facebook page is a photograph before Christmas, of Aaren hanging an ornament on a Christmas tree. The light shines just so. Almost ethereal.

“U look like a Christmas angel,” her dad commented.

His baby, his angel, lost in a hell of a city.

Chicago Police say investigators retrieved video surveillance footage from two cameras in the area and are pursuing a lead. On Wednesday, police said they believe the young woman may have been caught in the crossfire between two warring gang factions known to operate in her neighborhood.

Aaren was compassionate, intelligent, purposeful and wise beyond her years, say friends and co-workers, and the senseless, random manner of her death demands something meaningful be done to fill the void created when everything special about her left this earth.

They established a GoFundMe account this week to raise money for her funeral and a scholarship fund. By Tuesday, $25,000 in contributions were made.

We want to make sure that something positive can come from this senseless tragedy. While trying to solve the gun violence epidemic in Chicago seems like an impossible task, we need to start somewhere. We believe we can teach people to see the world from the perspective of others. We hope we can teach people that violence isn’t the answer and provide them with resources to pursue a different path. We think we can teach people how to come together and become a stronger, more unified community.

“Hopefully we can help prevent another tragedy like this,” former co-worker Willie Wilkov told DNAinfo Chicago.

They may fund a scholarship that would send Chicago kids overseas to study.

They may create an after-school program for children.

They are open to suggestions to make a difference in the name of their friend.

These are noble goals in a city where children are targeted for murder, infants and mothers alike can be struck down by gunfire at any given moment, or run down by a carload of hoodlums, where even a drive home from church can put you in the middle of a gang shootout.

Aaren O’Connor was in the wrong place at the wrong time in a city where wrong places are plentiful and wrong times grow more commonplace by the day.

May she rest in eternal peace.

In the city where she lost her life, peace seems well beyond reach.