The child's family took him to St. Bernard Hospital and he was transferred to Comer Children's Hospital, where he was listed in serious condition, police said.



Investigators questioned a person of interest overnight but released the person without charges early Thursday, police said.



This was the second time in two months that someone opened fire at the two-flat, Escalante said.



"Obviously someone at that residence was being targeted," he said. "This was a porch filled with family members, and the shooter just shot at the porch. (The boy) could just as easily have been killed."



Woods said she and her six children, including two sets of twins, were not at the home at the time. She returned to find his blood on the front steps. There were two bullet holes in her front window, just below a bullet hole in the window frame from the shooting in May that wounded a 53-year-old woman.



Woods said the boy didn't live at the two-flat but often stayed there and played with her daughter. "He's a happy little boy," she said.



He was the third young child to be shot in Englewood since Monday. Two cousins, 5 and 8, were wounded while playing with sparklers about a mile west.



Woods said her daughter "don't want to go outside anymore because they always shooting. ... She asked me if they're shooting kids on purpose.



"I pray," she added. "That's all I can do."



On Thursday morning, Morgan Street was mostly empty and quiet. A cadre of Chicago police officers on bicycles and SUVs circled the area, hoping to quell any retaliation and spread the word about an evening community rally at the intersection of 57th and Morgan streets.



A few doors south of Woods' home, Dorothy Johnson, 70, sat on her front porch, keeping watch over the street and recalling how the block has changed in the 25 years she has lived there.



Sitting comfortably on her shady porch, wearing a cooling headscarf and adorned in rings and jewelry, Johnson recalled how the large families she once knew and cared for had been replaced over time by renters.



As homeowners died and moved away from the block of two-flats and bungalows, drug dealing and crime moved in, Johnson said. Last November, Kenneth Noble, whom Johnson called one of her friendlier neighbors, was fatally shot and a second man wounded as they got into a van near her home.



"People used to come from miles around to look at the Christmas decorations there," Johnson said, pointing to a ramshackle coach house across the street from her two-flat.



"Now people just pay rent for three, four or five months, then move out. Or move 20 and 30 people in and they sell drugs," she said. "People ain't neighbors no more."



Johnson said she was in her dining room late Wednesday afternoon when she heard five pops. By the time she made it to her front window, she saw a man lift the wounded child into a car and drive away.



"I know that little boy," she said. "I see him riding around on a bicycle."