Betty Howard was just going to be a minute. She left the hazard lights of her car flashing as she dashed into a real estate office along a busy stretch of East 79th Street in Chatham to drop off some paperwork at her second job.
As she talked and laughed with co-workers inside late Thursday afternoon, a gang dispute erupted on the street. Bullets tore through a wall, one grazing Louis Hardy, 58, who dived to the floor before noticing Howard lying nearby with a gunshot to the head.
“My mind is racing, I’m trying to decide how best I could help her,” Hardy recalled today.
Howard's eyes were wide open, as if she were pleading for help. Hardy said he bent down and told her, “Hold on. Help is on the way.”
Howard died minutes later.
Hardy was grazed in the stomach and treated on the scene. A third person, a 23-year-old woman, was shot in the hand as she walked her Shih Tzu dog outside. She took cover at the corner and then realized she had been wounded.
Howard, 58, was among 14 people shot on the south and west sides Thursday, including a man seriously wounded near an elementary school on the West Side as children were being let out.
She was a respected special education teacher at one of Chicago’s highest-achieving public schools and the mother of two adult children. Her loss was mourned at Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy and by neighbors, relatives and colleagues.
Howard’s brother is a veteran Chicago cop who said the pain he sees every day on the streets was now "hitting home."
“I deal with it all day, every day, because I do work the streets and I'm aware of what's going on in the Chicagoland area. But it just has to stop,” Officer Orlando Long said outside Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where Howard was pronounced dead.
“I feel the pain, I know how other people feel now when we just go to the scenes and do what we have to do as a police officer," he said. "But now it’s hitting home and it’s a terrible situation.”
Howard regularly dropped by the real estate office in the 700 block of East 79th to catch up on paperwork or use the copier or fax machine, Hardy said. He had worked in the office since February and knew Howard as someone who was “down to earth” and had a good sense of humor. He could tell she was very committed to children.
Thursday afternoon, Howard was “kind of relaxing and going with the flow. . .She probably wasn’t there more than 10 minutes. She was telling us about her students at the school where she taught at, Gwendolyn Brooks."
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