CHICAGO — Donovan Price bowed his head and prayed in the parking lot of the University of Chicago Medical Center.
“Please give her strength,” he whispered.
Inside the emergency room, doctors scrambled to save the life of a 10-month-old girl with a bullet lodged in her shoulder — a baby who while strapped into a car seat this week was shot by someone in a passing vehicle traveling along an expressway on the South Side of Chicago.
Price steeled himself for another vigil. The 53-year-old self-described street pastor has found a calling in consoling the families of victims of gun violence. He scans his phone — waiting for texts, Twitter messages, phone calls — and then drives to street corners or hospitals. He searches for grace, but it seems like every day word of another shooting finds him.
“We who live in this city,” he said, “have to figure out how to end this now.”
This troubled city cannot be fixed, Price said, unless the underlying causes of violence are addressed and locals, not outside federal forces, provide the answers.