SOURCE: www.heyjackass.com
Reposting our standing Valentine’s Day content because it was so insightful, thoughtful, and simply brilliant, but with a few changes and additions.
“These murders went out of the comprehension of a civilized city, the butchering of seven men by open daylight raises this question for Chicago: Is it helpless?” – Chicago Tribune, February 16th, 1929
Aside from being better dressed, not much has changed in the subsequent 96 years. As of today, we’ve already recorded 45 homicides this year, which is nearly 7 times more than what the massacre tallied. In 2025, we tallied the equivalent 62 St. Valentine’s Day Massacres which is down from the 92 equivalent massacres in 2023, 105 massacres in 2022 and 122 massacres in 2021.
We’ve been fortunate enough to have never recorded seven homicides at the same location in our 11 years of tracking this nonsense, but we came close on February 2nd, 2016:
A co-worker’s concerns about a man who failed to show up at work led to a grisly discovery Thursday afternoon on Chicago’s Southwest Side — six bodies found inside a tidy brick home on a quiet street in the Gage Park neighborhood.
Chicago police officers who arrived at the home at 1 p.m. for a well-being check found no signs of a break-in but spotted a body on the floor just inside the home. A search revealed the scope of the carnage — five other victims, including at least one child, had been slain. (full story
Unlike the 1929 massacre where no one was convicted, the 2016 massacre did result in a conviction which even the casual follower knows is a rarity:
A judge denied bail for a man and his girlfriend charged in connection with the murder of six family members in their Gage Park home in February.
Diego Uribe-Cruz, 22, who is related to the family, and Jafeth Ramos, 19, face six counts of first-degree murder, Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson announced Thursday. The couple was arrested Wednesday night at their Little Village home where they were raising their infant son.
Police say both gave recorded confessions. At the bond hearing, the judge said the slaughter of the Martinez family “can only be described with two words: pure evil.” (full story)
Another parallel to today is that the code of silence (or “snitches get stitches” or “no talking”) was alive and well back then too. Frank Gusenberg, who was the only one of the seven to survive the attack, told the cops “nobody shot me”. He died three hours later from 14 bullet wounds. Today he’d be labeled as being ‘uncooperative’.
Massacres aside, since 2014 we have recorded 51 incidents with seven or more shot with a total of 439 shot, and 49 ended up proving fatal. Of those 49, the deadliest occurred on June 15th, 2021 in the 6200 block of South Morgan St. where a total of 8 people were shot with 5 killed. No one remembers that one.
If we look at just mass shootings as defined by an incident with four or more shot, since 2014 there have been 438 incidents with 2,161 shot where 286 proved fatal. No one remembers any of those either.
Then and Now
Back in 1929, the Illinois Crime Survey was released and a part of the massive tome was 50 pages of Chicago-related homicide data for 1926 and 1927. The way they did things back then was slightly different than today, but the definition of a homicide today is no different than in 1929:
In its broadest sense, “homicide” is defined in law as the killing of one person by another, but is popularly and erroneously understood to be limited to murder, and murder in turn is immediately associated in the mind of the average person with machine guns, sawed-off shotguns, pistol fights, pay roll robbery holdups and gang warfare. This is especially true of killings in Chicago. Homicide may perhaps best be described as the destruction of the life of one human being by the act, procurement, or culpable omission of another. It is either justifiable or excusable and, therefore, lawful; or it is felonious homicide, as in cases of murder and manslaughter.