Hours before 17-year-old Monterio Williams was gunned down on the street outside his high school, he was planning his future.

Williams, who always loved cars and motorcycles, had tracked down information about a trade school he was excited about attending after graduation and shared the news with his mom. That was her final communication with him.

“I dropped my son off at school and that was the last time I saw him alive,” Blondean Gartley, Williams’ mom, told the Sun-Times.

Boyhood friends, Williams and 16-year-old Robert Boston were shot and killed by masked gunmen in the Loop Friday afternoon near Innovations High School at the intersection of Washington Street and Wabash Avenue, where they were both students.

Gartley was shopping when she got a call from Williams’ dad. Not knowing if it was a graze wound or something more serious, she tried to stave off the panic and raced there.

As she worked her way through the chaotic scene, masses of officers kept her from getting close enough to see if the boy lying in the street was her son. Officers told her one ambulance had already gone to the hospital.

“In my mind, one of them is gone and one of them is still alive, and I don’t know who’s who,” Gartley said. “I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone or something. I’m just praying, praying, praying, at this moment.”

Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times

She followed a second ambulance to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where she was told that Williams had died. Donicka Doss, Boston’s mother got the same news.

“Is that really him?” Doss said she was thinking in the hospital waiting room.

Doss said her son was a “good kid” who liked basketball and video games.

The two grew up in the same Near West Side area and their families are friends, said Gartley, who struggled for the right words to say to Doss.

“I’ve never been through this, it hurts though, I don’t know what to say to her, I hate that this happened to these boys,” Gartley said.

“Every time I walked in the door, he would always come in from behind and hug me and smother me,” Gartley said. “He’d hold me tight to the point where I’d say ‘Okay, that’s enough, now let me go.’”

Gartley is unsure how she’ll ever get used to his absence.

“At this moment, I don’t even know if I have accepted it,” Gartley said. “I’m still calling his name.”

Provided

Williams and Boston are two of at least 11 minors that have been shot in Chicago so far this year, according to data kept by the Chicago Sun-Times. At least 25 homicides have been reported so far this year.

For Gartley, it’s long been a fear of hers that her children would get caught up in violence.

“A call too early in the morning, I’m scared. A call too late at night, I’m scared,” Gartley, said. “I feel like the streets of Chicago are like war. Is it gonna be your turn to get this call?”

Police have not announces any arrests.