Chicago Week in Photos: Hit-And-Run, Via Crucis & More

Three weeks into April 2026, Chicago handed its residents grief, ceremony, bloom, and confrontation inside the same seven days.

Damian Gomez is dead. The teenager was struck and killed in a hit-and-run at 63rd Street and Kedzie Avenue, a corner in Gage Park that doesn’t make the news unless something goes wrong. His father, Will Gomez, has Damian’s name tattooed on his skull. That’s the kind of grief that doesn’t translate into a press release. On April 8, the Gage Park Cyclists rode to Chicago Lawn and lit candles in Damian’s memory, joining a wave of fury that’s been building on the Southwest Side over reckless drivers who seem to face no consequence whatsoever.

No arrests have been announced.

The stretch of Kedzie where Damian was killed cuts through neighborhoods that rarely see city resources show up until someone’s already in the ground. Gage Park. Chicago Lawn. Bridgeport. These aren’t lifestyle-cycling communities. People there ride because they can’t afford not to, because the bus is late, because the car needs work, because that’s what you do. And they’re getting killed doing it. Family members have been raising alarms about dangerous driving conditions on Southwest Side streets for years, and the response has been inadequate. That’s not an opinion. It’s what the absence of arrests says on its own.

A few miles west, Little Village held its annual Via Crucis on April 3. Hundreds of residents packed 26th Street, spilling onto sidewalks outside Epiphany Roman Catholic Church at 2524 S. Keeler Ave., walking the Stations of the Cross in a procession that’s been part of this neighborhood’s calendar longer than most of the city’s politicians have been in office. The tradition draws thousands. Old men in dress shirts. Families with strollers. Kids who don’t know yet what the ritual means but will remember it anyway.

This year’s procession carried weight that went beyond liturgy. Little Village has had a hard stretch in 2026, and the Via Crucis served the community the way it always does when things get difficult. It showed people to each other. That matters more than any city program I’ve covered in 15 years on the beat.

On April 5, Jackson Park was a different scene entirely. The cherry blossoms along the Columbia Basin near the Museum of Science and Industry hit full bloom, and Hyde Park came out with cameras and kids and the kind of loose, unhurried energy that only shows up when the weather actually cooperates. Spring was on time for once. The park sat bright and crowded and almost deliberately beautiful against everything else the week had produced. Elsewhere in the city, people were mourning. Here they were photographing flowers, which is its own kind of necessity.

The week’s bureaucratic chapter played out on April 2 at Kelly High School, where Chicago Police Superintendent Larry Snelling appeared before a Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability meeting. The commission was created under the city’s 2021 police oversight ordinance. Demonstrators were in the room. Snelling denied that Chicago Police officers had assisted ICE agents in any enforcement operations, and he told the crowd the department is “trying to keep people safe.” The room wasn’t convinced, not entirely. Chicago’s sanctuary city policy dates back to 2017, but the current federal climate has residents asking questions that a single superintendent’s denial doesn’t fully answer.

The commission exists because residents demanded real oversight. That fight took years. It’s worth remembering that every time a top cop sits in a public meeting and faces skeptical constituents, the mechanism working is one that didn’t exist before 2021.

Block Club Chicago documented the week in photographs published April 10, capturing 875 moments the rest of the media cycle couldn’t hold onto long enough. Six days. Eight distinct stories. Three neighborhoods doing the work of grief and 360 degrees of public life packed into a stretch of spring weather that didn’t care what else was happening.

Will Gomez still has his son’s name on his head. The candles in Chicago Lawn burned out days ago.