Dante Hughes, 18, was pronounced dead at St. Bernard Hospital minutes after he was dropped off there early Thursday morning suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. Chicago police and the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office have since identified him, but detectives still don’t know where the shooting happened or who was responsible.
Hughes arrived at the Englewood hospital at about 6:42 a.m., according to authorities, and was pronounced dead shortly after, according to FOX 32 Chicago. Area detectives are investigating the shooting, but as of the outlet’s report, police had not released information about a shooting location or what led to the gunfire, and no arrests had been announced.
A Second Unexplained Drop-Off Death in a Month
Hughes’s death marks the second time in roughly a month that a fatally wounded shooting victim has been left at St. Bernard Hospital with no known crime scene attached. On August 2, a male gunshot victim with a chest wound was similarly dropped off at the hospital around 5:40 a.m. and died, again leaving Chicago police without a confirmed location for the shooting, Hoodline previously reported.
St. Bernard Hospital, at 326 West 64th Street, is a 100-bed safety-net facility and the only hospital operating in Englewood on Chicago’s South Side. Its role as the neighborhood’s sole emergency care provider means it frequently receives gunshot victims brought in by friends or family rather than ambulance, without police escort and without any account of where the shooting took place.
Why Police Get Called Even Without a Scene
Under Illinois statute 20 ILCS 2630/3.2, hospitals, physicians and nurses are required to notify local law enforcement immediately when they treat someone for a firearm injury if that patient did not arrive with a police officer. That statute is why Chicago police were dispatched to St. Bernard Hospital even though no one had reported a shooting scene, and it explains the pattern behind both this case and the one from a month earlier…