Gregory Anthony Sims Jr. / Facebook
By LOU FOGLIA
Homicide Watch Chicago
Gregory Anthony Sims Jr. was about to realize one of his goals -- having his own apartment.
The 25-year-old’s scheduled move-in date was Friday, Sept. 16, but the move never happened, family members said.
Instead—on that same Friday—family and friends gathered for a funeral after Sims was shot multiple times and killed on Sept. 8.
Sims was arguing with a man in the 4500 block of North Kenmore when that man pulled out a gun and shot him five times in the chest and twice in the right leg, according to Chicago Police and the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
He was taken to Illinois Masonic Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
His mother, Tracy Sims, said she moved her five children to get away from the city’s violence when her son was in fifth grade.
“I didn’t want my babies to be a statistic,” Sims said. “I moved him out of that atmosphere.”
Gregory Anthony Sims Jr. / Family photo
She relocated her family to Iowa City, Iowa, where Sims attended West High School and developed a love for competitive chess.
“He loved his chess,” she said. “He had a nice wooden chess board.”
In 2011, when the family moved back to Chicago to take care of their grandmother, Sims brought his passion for the game with him.
He would commute from his home on the South Side to his mother’s residence in Uptown. He would visit his siblings and play chess with the neighborhood’s homeless in the abandoned Graeme Stewart Elementary School lot on Kenmore Avenue—the same location where he would be shot, according to his mother.
“He’d take to light the homeless and the needy people,” Sims said. “That’s where he would go every day.”
She said she regretted returning to Chicago.
“I just wish I would have left back up out of here—I really do."
Sims said everyone knew her son as "fatty"—a nickname given to him as a baby for his weight.
“He got fat pretty quick as a baby,” Sims said, adding her son weighed a whopping 18 pounds less than two months after he was born.
Gregory Anthony Sims Jr. / Family photo
“[The weight] didn’t last once he started walking,” she said. “The fat flew off him, but we couldn’t stop calling him fatty.”
Sims was his mother's first child, born when she was 21. She called the experience a “joy.”
“There was nobody else in the room but me and him,” she said. “I had my own baby—I couldn’t believe it ... I can’t believe I won't see my baby no more.”