Med school scholarship to honor ER doctor slain in Mercy Hospital shooting
Former classmates of Dr. Tamara O’Neal, the emergency room doctor killed in the Mercy Hospital shooting in November, created a scholarship in her name.
The Tamara O’Neal MD Scholarship Fund will support a first-year medical student in the University of Illinois’ Urban Health Program.
The group of friends has raised $68,000 thus far.
If funding allows, the fund will also offer a second scholarship to support a fourth-year medical student who will complete his or her residency in emergency medicine — the field O’Neal chose.
O’Neal was a 2014 UIC College of Medicine graduate and a 2017 emergency medicine resident graduate.
Chisalu Nchekwube, now a family medicine resident at Advocate Christ Hospital in Oak Lawn, was one of O’Neal’s closest med school friends.
“Tamara made sure that our group of friends continued to get together even after we all graduated and were all over the country doing our residencies,” Nchekwube said in a statement issued by the school. “Our group became like a family and Tamara was the matriarch, the glue that held us together.”
O’Neal was working as an emergency room physician at Mercy Hospital in Chicago, where she also volunteered her time to teach clinical residents, when she was fatally shot Nov. 19 by her his ex-fiancée.
Also slain in the shooting were Chicago Police Officer Samuel Jimenez, who was responding to the scene, and pharmacy resident Dayna Less, who had just graduated in May 2018 from Purdue University with a doctor of pharmacy degree.
The gunman, Juan Lopez, was wounded by police before he fatally shot himself.