COLLATERAL DAMAGE: Woman moved to Chicago to be with boyfriend, gets shot dead by stray gang bullet

What happens when you gut a major metropolitan police department, and cripple it with a lack of support of street cops from senior management appointed by the city’s far-left Democrat leadership?

What happens when the street cops are readily tossed under the bus by opportunistic far-left Democrat politicians running said city?

You get heartbreaking stories of innocent, law-abiding, productive citizens cut down in the prime of their lives by criminal violence.  Not people supposedly “turning their lives around” or “getting their life together”, but people who have always been good and decent people whose only mistake was thinking that criminal violence “only happens to other people”.

We’ll let Second City Cop take it from there:

Not a safe neighborhood by any stretch of the imagination. It’s certainly unfortunate that Rahm cut the number of police by over 1,200, hasn’t hired to keep pace with attrition resulting in further shortages, and then made an agreement with the ACLU to prevent the remnants of the Department to actually do their jobs safely and effectively.

CHICAGO (WLS) — A young woman killed by a stray bullet in the Heart of Chicago neighborhood is one of the city’s latest victims of gun violence.

Aaren O’Connor had recently moved from California here to Chicago for a new job and to be with her long-distance boyfriend. Her father says he didn’t want her to go because of the city’s violence problem.

“I pleaded with her when she told me she was going to go to Chicago,” her father said. “I said there are much safer places for you to be.”

Now, David O’Connor is living the nightmare he always feared. His daughter Aaren was killed on the streets of Chicago after moving here from California.

The 25-year-old brand manager was hit in the head in the 2100-block of W. 21st street by a stray bullet, police say, while sitting in her car Friday after getting home from work.

At the time, Aaren was on the phone with her sister. When the line cut out, her father tried calling back.

“She was incoherent, didn’t know where she was, and kept saying that her head hurts. Her head hurts,” he said. “I wish I could have known what was going on, so I could have told her that I love her one more time.”