#5 The 1999 Chicago Fourth of July Tri-State Shooting Massacre That You Might Have Never Heard Of Before- The 1999 Independence Day Weekend Tri-State Shootings Story

Talking about random things is what we do as we discuss both my favorite television shows ever while incorporating what makes the state of Indiana a great place to live. Here on "Keeping Up in The Middle" we discuss what makes our state a great place while tying Frankie into the message of the week throughout our crazy lives and in our crazy state in the state of Indiana as we cover everything from crime to politics to what makes Indiana great and sports. From producer, Braydyn Lents, this episode is the second episode crime edition of our podcast on, "Keeping Things Up in the Middle" explores the case of Benjamin Smith, a racist young man who was causing trouble from a young age and was fascinated with a white supremacist movement that wanted to cause harm to anyone not white. His mania and obsession with the group led him to cause the first major horrific tri-shooting spree on the Fourth of July across Bloomington, Indiana & in the neighborhoods of Chicago on a two-night shooting spree in 1999.

From July 2-4 of 1999, a two-state shooting spree across Chicago and Bloomington, Indiana that took five lives away from us, helped implement changes made to state laws on racist crimes and how the courts should handle these types of racially motivated attacks. Benjamin Smith [to the far left] took the lives of Won-Joon Yoon [the Asian man on the left side next to the basketball team] & former Northwestern University men's basketball head coach, Ricky Byrdsong [to the right] who was shot by Smith, a radical racist out to k*ll as many Black, Jewish, and Asian people as possible, shot and killed Byrdsong IN FRONT OF HIS OWN CHILDREN before making pit stops at Springfield and Decatur, Illinois before making his last stop in Bloomington, Indiana, where he was once a student at IU and shot Won-Joon Yoon when he was attended a Korean church service that weekend. In the end, Smith pew-pewed himself and passed away in Illinois.

SOURCES INCLUDING PHOTOS AND DESCRIPTIONS WERE PROVIDED FROM THESE SOURCES : - Wikipedia Information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Independence_Day_weekend_shootings - YMCA Evanston Northshore in Chicago, Illinois: https://www.ywca-ens.org/rah - Washington Post article from 1999: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/daily/july99/hatecrimes04.htm - Bloomington Herald-Times Newspaper https://www.heraldtimesonline.com/story/news/1999/07/04/gunman-kills-korean-man-outside-church/118564208/ - The Indiana Daily Student Newspaper [Student Paper of Indiana University] with Photos and Video provided from the memorial service: https://www.idsnews.com/multimedia/yoon19 https://issuu.com/idsnews/docs/binder1_b1537ea6052c98/1 and also one more shoutout to my friends at Bloom Magazine who found the last photo before the IDS newspaper clippings from a 20-year edition of the Indiana Daily Student honor Won-Joon Yoon on July 1, 2019

YouTube LINK TO THIS VIDEO: https://youtu.be/gtV24aHDcXU