Belleville residents describe gunfight outside their homes, still waiting for answers
Nick Callico was working in his garage last Friday night when he heard several pops right outside the closed overhead door.
“It was like, ‘bam, bam, bam, bam, bam!’”
Curious, Callico considered opening the door before his neighbor from across the street called.
“She said not to open the garage door, and that there’s a man with a gun standing in the driveway,” he said.
The neighbor told him that two men were shooting at each other with guns and that one was in her front yard and the other was ducking for cover behind his boat trailer. That’s when Callico ran inside and met his girlfriend, Tracy Richwine, who had taken cover inside the home.
Callico and Richwine say that the rolling gun fight Belleville police are investigating from that night happened in a North Charles Street neighborhood. The shootout lasted about five or six minutes, they say.
Though Callico walked outside the house when the shooting stopped and spoke with other neighbors about what had just happened, Richwine said she was afraid to leave until the next day.
“(Police) didn’t say they’d caught anyone, so I didn’t know if one of them was still out there,” she said.
On Tuesday, Lt. Todd Keilbach of the Belleville police told the BND that police had one person in custody from the incident, but that the person hadn’t been charged yet. The other shooter has not been identified or apprehended.
Belleville police had not offered further details on the open investigation as of Thursday afternoon.
Damage done
No one was injured during the incident, but there were several reports of property damage, including three vehicles belonging to Callico and Richwine that were riddled with bullet holes.
Longtime residents of the neighborhood Mark and Denise Juen were not home during the incident, but arrived just as crime scene technicians were taping off their street.
“I had no idea what was going on,” Juen said in a phone interview Wednesday night. “The crime scene investigator there told me there had been a shooting and asked my wife to check for bullet holes in our house.”
The couple was on their way back home from Lebanon when they’d stopped somewhere to eat for about 20 minutes.
“Had we not stopped, we would have driven right into the line of fire because this incident was going down at the same exact time,” Juen said. “We could have been collateral damage as these guys were shooting.”
Juen said the cars parked in front of his house, which were not theirs, took the brunt of the damage.
“Had they not been there, my house would have been hit with 20 to 25 rounds of shots,” he said. “It was a little unnerving to walk up to. ... It was like a war scene. This wasn’t just someone firing a single shot. Somebody was definitely trying to kill somebody.”
Another man who lives on the street, pastor Delaron Douglas, said that a bullet came through his apartment window and hit the spot in the living room where he had been sitting just moments before.
Johnny Kicklighter, who lives on the street and has been a Belleville resident for 26 years, said his wife and grandson were inside their home at the time of the shooting, watching “Spiderman.”
“Had the (perpetrator) been just 30 degrees to the left, the bullet would have penetrated the window of my house and struck my grandchild,” Kicklighter told city council members during a meeting Monday night.
At the same council meeting, Assistant Police Chief Matt Eiskant told residents who had property damage as a result of the shootout that they could reach out to the Illinois Attorney General’s Office, which can reimburse victims of violent crimes as part of the Crime Victim Compensation Act.
Waiting for answers
At Monday’s meeting, North Charles Street residents gathered to ask their elected officials to do more about the crime in their neighborhood. Six of them spoke during the public comment portion of the meeting.
“Our goal was to let them know what happened and more importantly, let them understand that we are very upset about this,” Juen said. “We are hoping for quicker communication when something like this happens.”
Callico, Richwine and the Juens all said they had not heard from either of the alderwomen in their ward, Carmen Ducco and Jane Pusa, in response to the shooting. Ducco and Pusa could not be reached for comment Thursday afternoon.
“You could see on the face of the aldermen who faced us (at the meeting) that they didn’t know anything about a running gun battle,” Juen said. “In Belleville, with what goes on and how many people are tied together, I find it hard to believe that not one of these people know anything about what is happening.”
All of the residents who spoke to the BND said that they had not heard from Belleville police since the immediate aftermath of the shootout either.
“We don’t expect to hear from them,” Juen said. “I know that they’re doing their job investigating.”
During the meeting, Mayor Mark Eckert said Belleville Police Chief William Clay had penned a statement to residents of the neighborhood, but Callico, Richwine and Juen all said they had not received it. Clay has not responded to the BND’s multiple attempts to reach him since Tuesday.
Richwine said that she was disappointed in Eckert’s response to the residents’ comments at the meeting too.
“Each one of us had a different question, but the mayor gave the same repetitive, generic answer,” she said. “We haven’t gotten much information about anything.”
Callico said that he’s lived in the neighborhood since 1976 and this is the first time something like this has happened. He described a close-knit community on their street, where neighbors care about each other.
Juen said that as home and property owners, residents on North Charles Street have invested in the city.
Eckert said Monday that there has been crime in other areas of the city, but that usually is between people who know each other.
“A series of crimes everywhere may be true, but a shooting where people are running up and down the street of a small neighborhood... We’re not talking about a huge area, but a handful of houses that are impacted,” Juen said. “A lot of people are in danger over here that are not even being thought about.
“We love Belleville,” he said. “We don’t want what’s important to us taken away because of somebody who has no care what happens to our streets and our neighborhood.”
This story was originally published October 25, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
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