By Rosemary Regina Sobol
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — Jamyah Lee, 7 months old, was lying in bed playing with her toys over the weekend when a chunk of concrete shattered the window of her Englewood home and hit her in the head, fracturing her skull, according to police and family.
“Where I come from, you think about bullets going through the window. You never hear about bricks going through the window,” the baby’s mother, Janica Lee, said by phone Monday from her daughter’s room at Comer Children’s Hospital.
Jamyah was moved out of intensive care Monday afternoon, and a Comer spokeswoman said the baby remains hospitalized in “fair-to-good” condition.
“It’s a serious injury, but we expect the fracture to heal on its own,” the spokeswoman said.
Police say a 25-year-old man, angry after an argument, threw a piece of concrete through the window of Lee’s home in the 1400 block of West 73rd Place around 8:25 p.m. Sunday.
Officer Janel Sedevic, a spokeswoman for the Chicago Police Department, said the argument was “domestic-related,” and no arrests had been made.
Lee said it started when a man came to the home where she and Jamyah live with her mother, father and two siblings. The man demanded to see a 19-year-old woman who sometimes stays at the home.
It was warm, and the front door was open, so the family heard the man step onto their porch and begin “yelling and screaming,” according to Lee.
“He came over to the house looking for her. I saw him and my dad exchanging words,” Lee said. “Then he said, ‘OK since she’s not here, you’re all fitting to pay for this,’’’ she said.
He left but came back two or three minutes later, she said. “He pulled back up, and I’m standing inside the doorway. My baby is inside a bedroom on the bed playing with toys, like she always does. It happened so quick. He came back to my dad’s face, and they had more words.
“He said, ‘Why you playing me?’ He turned around, and he took a couple of steps and then threw it. He must have turned around so quickly because all I heard is the glass breaking and my baby screaming,” Lee said. “I just stood there and froze.”
The baby’s grandmother was first to race into the bedroom. “I saw the brick lying next to the pillow, and I saw her. It was crazy, I didn’t know what to do.’’
She called 911, and a dispatcher told her to make sure Jamyah did not fall asleep. Lee looked at her screaming child, who had started to throw up. The paramedics arrived, and Lee rode in the ambulance with her baby.
“We got to the hospital, and they put her in a neck brace. All you see is the knot getting bigger and bigger,” Lee said. “It’s right on my baby’s soft spot.”
A doctor told the family that the baby suffered two fractures and that there was bleeding on the brain. At 3 a.m., doctors said the bleeding had stopped but there was a blood clot.
“She cried for three hours straight and finally went to sleep,” Lee said. “When she woke up this morning, she was reaching for me and she was playing a little bit. The doctors say it is good that she is a baby because her brain ... it’s just like a puzzle. It’s going to put itself together like a puzzle, and she won’t need surgery.”
Her daughter will likely have to take medication to prevent seizures, Lee said.
Lee said she and her mother spoke to detectives at the hospital and identified the man in a photo.
Lee said her block is “nicer” than others in the neighborhood, with mostly older people. Parts of the street are being redone, so Lee said that is probably where the concrete came from. It was about the size of a baseball and had metal sticking out of it.
“This is crazy,” she said.
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