About an hour and a half after a fatal shooting Wednesday night, the sidewalk outside the emergency room was starting to get crowded around Jose Hernandez.

He stood quietly as more and more people drove up and began to pace outside the University of Chicago Medical Center. The smell of cigarettes hung in the air. He scanned faces, looking for people he might recognize from the crime scene where a young man was found on a street in the Douglas neighborhood with a gunshot wound to the head.

Everyone Hernandez saw faced a long list of unknowns, about the killing itself and everything that would come next.

“People don’t know what to expect,” he said.

Hernandez is a crisis responder, whose job it is to connect with the families of homicide victims in the first blurry hours after a violent d

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