DuPage County mass shooting puts spotlight on ‘lost community’

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Even now, more than 100 days later, the terrifying scenarios play on a loop in Twanda Carroll’s mind.

What if her apartment hadn’t been empty that night in June? What if her three young grandchildren had been staying with her like they did every summer? What if she and her daughter had decided not to spend an extra night with family in Wisconsin?

“I still get emotional,” Carroll, 51, said recently. “I’m just so hurt I start crying. What if something would have happened to my grandbabies, or my daughter, or me?”

Shortly before 12:30 a.m. on June 18, in a strip mall parking lot across from Carroll’s apartment off Illinois Route 83 near Willowbrook, a mass shooting killed one person and injured at least 22 others gathered for what had been billed as a Juneteenth celebration.

One of the bullets fired that night shattered Carroll’s patio window and lodged in the wall next to her living room couch. A second broke her bedroom window and tore through her closet into her kitchen wall.

“When I come home and think about how the bullets came through my house,” Carroll said, “I don’t see how we could have made it.”

Four months later, Carroll and others say the response to the mass shooting has only reinforced long-simmering feelings of neglect among the 3,000-plus residents clustered in apartment and condominium complexes in an unincorporated area on DuPage County’s southeastern edge.

Read more on this story by Jonathan Bullington.

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