Highland Park parade shooting follows other mass shootings

The shooting at Highland Park’s Fourth of July parade Monday put the North Shore town in chilling company with other communities across Chicago and the suburbs where neighbors, co-workers, students and residents have faced terror and tragedy when gunmen opened fire.

In Aurora in 2019, a gunman killed five fellow employees at a warehouse and wounded others, including five police officers. In DeKalb, five students were killed and 17 others injured in a shooting at Northern Illinois University in 2008. Less than two weeks ago, a worker at WeatherTech in Bolingbrook shot three co-workers, killing one.

It’s a grim club of communities that, once joined, makes every other shooting feel closer to home, said Clayton Muhammad, spokesman for the city of Aurora. As time goes by and the national attention fades, the community is left to deal with the reality of what happened.

“We could do nothing else,” he said. “We were either going to crumble over something that happened that day and killed those innocent souls and (let that) define us, or we could come together.”

[ What we know about the mass shooting in Highland Park ]

This wasn’t the north suburbs’ first shooting spree over a July Fourth holiday weekend. In 1999, a 21-year-old white supremacist raised in the North Shore communities of Wilmette and Northfield went on a multiday shooting rampage, targeting members of racial and religious minority groups in Chicago’s West Rogers Park neighborhood, suburban Skokie and Northbrook, Springfield, Decatur, Urbana and Indiana. He killed two people, including former Northwestern basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong, and injured nine others.

In the years since then, other suburbs have grappled with shootings at workplaces and in public spaces. These are some of them.

On Feb. 15, 2019, a disgruntled employee opened fire inside the Henry Pratt Co., killing five co-workers, wounding another employee and injuring five police officers, before he was killed in a shootout with police. The gunman had been ordered years earlier to relinquish the handgun he used in the shooting after authorities discovered he never should have been issued a gun permit. He did not comply, and was never forced to give up the gun.

Every anniversary of the shooting dredges up the wounds of that day, but it’s important to commemorate the tragedy, Muhammad said. Years later, the reality of the shooting remains for those who lost loved ones, knew officers who were injured or who continue to work at the Henry Pratt Co.

Those years have also forced the city to think about how to move forward, he said. In the immediate aftermath the city came together, adopting a mentality of “Aurora Strong.” That solidarity has been important, but it’s also important to try to maintain unity without forever linking it to a tragedy.

“It means devastation in those moments, but it also built a new level of dedication,” he said.

[ Timeline: List of recent high-profile shootings in the US ]

A gunman kicked in the door to a lecture hall stage at Northern Illinois University on Valentine’s Day 2008 and fired into the auditorium, killing five students and injuring 17 others.

Less than seven minutes into the ambush, he turned the gun on himself.

In the months leading up to the shooting, a series of events sent the gunman, a former NIU student, into a tailspin and spurred the violent return of a mental illness, a report later released by the university found.

The former mayor of DeKalb told the Aurora Beacon-News in 2019 a stunned community looked for answers in the weeks after the shooting, eventually rallying around lyrics from the NIU Huskies’ fight song: “Forward, together forward.” Though the community came out stronger, the memory of the shooting endures, Jerry Smith said at the time.

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Days before the NIU shooting, five women were killed inside a Lane Bryant store in Tinley Park. Another woman was injured.

Shortly after 10 a.m. on Saturday, Feb. 2, 2008, four women, including two employees, were in the store when a man came in, posing as a delivery person. The man announced he was robbing the store and forced the four women into a backroom, where he bound them with duct tape and ordered them to lay facedown on the floor, police have said.

Two other women who came into the store at some point were tied up in the back room beside the others.

When police arrived, they found five of the women dead, shot in the back of the head. A sixth woman had also been shot, and survived.

The case has never been solved.

In February 2001, a former Navistar International Corp. worker strode into the company’s Melrose Park plant and opened fire. William D. Baker killed four workers and wounded four more before taking his own life. Baker used a golf bag to conceal a cache of guns, including an AK-47 assault rifle.

sfreishtat@chicagotribune.com