Youth baseball players hit ground at St. Rita High School field as gunshots ring out steps from campus

CHICAGO (CBS) — Nearly two dozen gunshots rang out Thursday afternoon within easy earshot of a freshman baseball game in progress at St. Rita of Cascia High School on the Southwest Side.

As CBS 2’s Charlie De Mar reported, Gamechanger app video shows the baseball game between the St. Rita Freshman Mustangs and Marmion Academy in progress when 23 shots ring out. A track meet was also going on at St. Rita at the time.

When the gunshots ring out, several young players drop right down where they area on the diamond.

St. Rita freshman baseball coach Brendan Garrett said in a statement late Thursday that there was an “isolated shooting that happened on Western Avenue which is not on St. Rita’s campus.”

“Nobody from St. Rita nor Marmion was near the shooting and everyone on St. Rita’s campus is safe,” Both baseball games were finished, as well as the track meet that is still going on,” Garrett wrote.

Police said the shooting happened steps away from the school. A 42-year-old woman was coming out of the McDonald’s drive-thru at 7832 S. Western Ave. in a black Lexus early Thursday evening, when a dark-colored sport-utility vehicle went by and someone inside fired shots toward her Lexus – also causing damage to five other parked cars, police said.

The suspects fled east on 79th Street, police said.

The scene is about a block from St. Rita of Cascia High School, which is located at 7740 S. Western Ave.

CBS 2’s De Mar talked to some track athletes who heard the shots.

“We heard some pretty serious gunshots, and it kind of scared the whole team, and we had this really big – we had this group chat, and everyone kept texting, and it was like, ‘Are you guys OK?'” said high school freshman Sophia Roy.

“At first, I didn’t know if they were gunshots or not. I thought they might have been fireworks or something,” said high school freshman Sorin Olinger, “and then I started to get a little worried. I was like, what the heck is going on here?”

Late Thursday, police did not have anybody in custody.