A cancer survivor was shot and killed Sunday just hours after arriving at Chicago to start a PhD program, said his loved ones. Shane Colombo was 25.
Cops said that he was shot in the abdomen while out by Clark and Howard streets, the victim of a stay bullet from a shootout between two people, according to ABC News.
No suspects have been identified. Cops released surveillance images showing three people sought for interviews in connection to the incident.
Fiancé Vincent Perez said he last spoke to Colombo only a short time before the shooting.
“I told him, ‘You need to stay home,'” he said during the press conference on Tuesday. “‘You need to rest. You just got in.'”
Perez said he got worried after Colombo stopped texting him. He checked his location on the phone, and found out his fiancé was in the hospital.
“I called, and they told me he had just passed when I called,” he said. “So I didn’t get to say goodbye to him.”
Colombo’s mother Tonya Colombo told ABC News that she last saw to her son when she kissed him goodbye before his flight from California that morning. She said Shane was going to Chicago to study clinical psychology at Northwestern University.
“I was very concerned about him coming out here, and he was killed within four hours of being in the city, four hours of stepping off that plane,” she said.
He survived getting lymphoma at age 15, she said.
“He beat cancer and he pushed himself through high school after missing a year,” she said. “He pushed himself through college on his own. And came to Chicago to get his Ph.D. He got a full scholarship to Northwestern. He didn’t depend on me to go to school. He depended on himself.”
[Screengrab via ABC; Perez at center. Tonya Colombo on his immediate right]