As 2026 begins, Chicago reports a historic decline in shootings and homicides, even as the city struggles with hundreds of gunfire injuries every year.
Among the victims over the past year is Gentry Hunt, a basketball coach who was shot Sunday outside St. Sabina Church in the Auburn Gresham neighborhood.
“I was lying there on the sidewalk, with my head in the mud, and they were pressing on my chest,” Hunt recalled.
The basketball coach started the new year grateful for life, just days after he was shot.
“I could feel that a little bit, that quick tear through my flesh,” he said.
Hunt is a volunteer basketball coach at East-West University and organizes basketball clinics for teens in Chicago.
On Sunday he was walking into a tournament in St. Sabina when a fight broke out outside and someone started shooting into the crowd. Chicago police said three people were hit and have since released photos of two men wanted in connection with the shooting.
The incident was one of the last shootings of the year in the city, with gun violence overall plummeting.
Shootings and murders are down 30%, but hundreds of victims are still caught in the crossfire.
“It’s in everyone’s backyard,” he said.
The coach said the bullet barely missed his lung and tore through his camp jersey.
“The shirt has all the signatures of all my former sixth and seventh grade students on it,” he said.
On Friday, Gentry plans to meet with his students to share a real-life example of gratitude and how fragile life can be.
“You don’t really understand how easy it is to press a button and end a life,” he said. “A simple movement of your finger that ends a life.”
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