Couple ID'd in Loop Murder-Suicide

Store is closed for the remainder of the day

A man and woman were shot and killed Friday after being shot inside the Old Navy in the Loop.  It appears to be a murder-suicide.

Employees at The Old Navy store, at State and Washington streets, flagged down officers on a routine patrol in the area around 11 a.m. and were told of the shooting.

A man walked into the store, which was open for business, shot his girlfriend and then turned the gun on himself, police said.  The victims were found in an employee-only area in the basement of the store away from the retail floors.

Dead are 22-year-old Tranesha Palms and 27-year-old Eugene Robertson, the Cook County Medical Examiner's office said late Friday.  They lived together in an apartment in the 10220 block of South Walden Parkway in Chicago's Beverly neighborhood.

A neighbor said she's heard the couple, who have a 2-year-old son, fighting a couple of times over the course of the the last year. 

"It's kind of sad to say, but you don't want to get involved because you feel that it's somebody else's business," the neighbor, Marilyn Watson, said, adding that police were called to the apartment within the last month or two.  "I thought it was reconciled then."

Palms was an employee of the Old Navy store.

Following the shooting, stunned employees quickly tried to clear the store of customers.

"We thought it was kind of a joke at first," one customer said.  "We didn't really know what was going on.  And then we realized it was something real serious, and when she [a store employee] said it with a sense of urgency, and then certainly when we saw the cops come in with their guns drawn, we started taking it seriously and tried to get out of there as soon as we could."

A tourist from San Francisco said police were frisking customers as they exited the store.

After the shooting, crowds of pedestrians gathered on the sidewalk outside the shuttered store, which is just blocks from Chicago's City Hall. Yellow police tape blocked off the scene.
 

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Copyright AP - Associated Press
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