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*Walking angel': Girl who performed at Obama's inauguration shot dead in
Chicago*
By Tracy Connor, Staff Writer, NBC News
January 30, 2013, 1:17 pm

Hadiya Pendleton, 15, a student at King College Prep, was killed
Tuesday at a Chicago park.

A 15-year-old girl who performed at President Obama's inauguration last
week was shot dead Tuesday while hanging out with friends after school in
bullet-scarred Chicago.

Hadiya Pendleton -- described by family as a “walking angel” -- was
standing under a canopy in Vivian Gordon Harsh Park when a gunman ran down
an alley, opened fire and fled in a white car, police said.

Pendleton was shot in the back but managed to run about a block before she
collapsed, officer Laura Kubiak said. She died at the hospital.

A 16-year-old boy was wounded in the 2:20 p.m. incident. Police said
Pendleton, who had no criminal record, was probably not the intended target.

“Never in a million years did I think I would get a call that my own baby
had been gunned down,” Pendleton’s mother, Cleo Cowley, said through tears
from her Chicago home.

She said she was at work Tuesday afternoon when she got an unexpected call
from one of her daughter’s friends.

“She was screaming on the phone that Hadiya’s been shot, she’s been shot,
and I just didn’t understand,” said Cowley.
Courtesy the Pendleton family
<http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/01/30/undefined>

Photos of Hadiya Pendleton from her trip to Washington.

She and other relatives described the teen as a honor student, an
insatiable reader who still found time to play volleyball and a twirl a
baton in the school marching band.

“As usual, the bad guy aims, but he never hits the other bad guy . . . He
hits the one that hurts the most to lose,” the victim’s godfather, Damon
Stewart, 36, who is a police officer, told the Chicago Sun-Times.

“I changed her diapers, I played with her growing up. My heart is broken.”

A sophomore at selective King College Prep High School, Pendleton had
traveled to Washington to perform with the band at inaugural events.

“It was the highlight of her young 15-year-old life,” Sen. Richard Durbin,
D-Ill., said Wednesday at a Senate hearing on gun violence.

“Just a matter of days after the happiest day of her life, she’s gone.”

Cousin Shatira Wilks said the upcoming inauguration trip was the talk of a
family gathering around New Year’s, but the young majorette was even more
excited about something else: plans to travel to Europe this spring with
the band.

“She was an honor student all her life,” Wilks said. “Honestly, she was a
walking angel. She never once gave her mom any problems ever.”

Wilks said the teen doted on her 10-year-old brother, Junior, who is
devastated.

“At Christmas this year, she was designated the elf and she handed out all
the gifts,” she recalled.

“She loved rock music. She was always listening and playing to music,”
Wilks said,. “What you would usually catching her doing is texting on her
phone, like all the teenagers.”

Pendleton last tweeted just before 1 a.m. on Tuesday. “I’m tired,” she
wrote.

Many of her classmates changed their Twitter handles to honor her and
decried the violence that had claimed an innocent life.

“You are more than loved and missed,” one wrote. “Your laugh smile and
silly happy personality has made my day more times than I can remember.
Nobody deserves this, especially not you.”

Friends of the young majorette described her as a bubbly, well-liked
student.

“She was always smiling and laughing,” said Tyler Genovesi, 14. “She was
just a really nice person. … There’s a lot of people crying in school
today. It’s very sad. The band is playing for her right now.”

Pendleton's murder was one of three shooting deaths in the city on Tuesday.
More than 40 people have been shot dead in Chicago since the beginning of
the year. There were 506 homicides in the city last year, a 16 percent
increase even as other large cities, like New York, saw murders drop.

“We are awash in guns,” Durbin said, noting that six times as many guns as
confiscated in Chicago as in New York each year. We have guns everywhere
and some believe the solution to this is more guns. I disagree.”

Cowley broke down sobbing when she was told that her daughter’s death had
been mentioned in the Senate.

“Something does need to change,” she said. “Where are the guns coming from?
I don’t own a gun. My daughter was not violent. I never would have thought
she would die like this.=9