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Posted by Robert
Rap News Network
1/10/2005 7:28:43 AM
Tags and topics realted to this article include Twista.
The lights were back on, the disc jockey had just stopped the music and at 3:10 a.m. the dancing and drinking were over for patrons at Cafe Allure.
Four men outside still wanted in. The head bouncer, a massive man who'd been a security guard to hip-hop artists, turned them away.
"I got this, I'll take care of this," witnesses heard as one of the spurned men turned a semiautomatic weapon on the popular bouncer, Timothy McClellan, in the doorway, then fired blindly into the club.
After more than a dozen shots, McClellan, 34, and another man lay dead early Saturday morning at the dance club, at 1501 N. Dayton St. in Chicago's Goose Island area. A third man, shot in the back of the head, was on life support late Saturday. Four patrons were treated at hospitals for gunshot wounds and were expected to survive.
"The disregard for human life just boggles my mind," Harlan Powell, an attorney for Cafe Allure, said Saturday afternoon. "You don't see somebody throwing off 14 rounds because they couldn't get a drink at 3 in the morning."
Police on Saturday were seeking four men, including at least two believed to have been at a private birthday party earlier in the night on the second floor of Cafe Allure. Detectives have leads in the case but were conducting interviews with many people, police spokesman David Bayless said.
A lounge and bistro that boasts of being "the hottest nightspot in Chicago," Cafe Allure draws a diverse mix of clubbers who sit on leopard-skin barstools or dance to a variety of hip-hop, jazz, house and funk music.
Patrons said it had been a normal night. The birthday party upstairs had ended shortly before 3 a.m. Staff members were cleaning upstairs and the ground floor was still crowded when gunfire erupted.
"We all hit the deck," said disc jockey Jeff Norwood.
Makeda Roby, 28, of Oak Park, was in a group of women who had been dancing and sipping martinis on the first floor. They avoided the gunfire by ducking into a men's room, where several patrons dialed police on their cell phones.
"It just seemed like the gunshots were never going to stop," Roby said. "I can still hear gunshots. ... Some guy busted into the bathroom and said he got shot in the hand. All I could remember was being in the bathroom praying to God to get me home."
After piecing together the scene with employees, witnesses and investigators, club attorney Powell said that between 13 and 15 shell casings had been recovered. He credited the lead bouncer, McClellan, for saving additional lives.
"He jumped in front of the gunman," Powell said. "He certainly paid the ultimate price for that."
Police were still trying to determine Saturday whether more than one weapon had been used in the attack.
As McClellan went down at the front of the club, so did his friend, Eugene C. Walker Jr., 24, another bouncer who had worked at the club for only a few weeks. Walker, shot in the head, was severely injured.
Powell said one gunman then reached around the front entry and fired into the crowd.
"If he had actually taken the time to enter the club he could have done serious, serious human damage," Powell said.
Another shot came through a club window. As the assailants escaped they shot and killed another man outside, 22-year-old Tyrone Bonner, who had been inside Cafe Allure, family members said.
Bonner, of the 1000 block of West Maxwell Street, was on parole for a 2002 conviction for carjacking and also had been convicted of manufacture and delivery of cocaine, according to court records. Officials did not disclose how many times Bonner and the other victims had been shot.
His mother, LaWanda Brown, said Bonner was a snazzy dresser who enjoyed playing basketball, received his GED while in prison, and was determined to turn his life around. On Monday, he was scheduled to attend a meeting about a possible custodial position at O'Hare Airp
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