It was just before noon on a Sunday. The Eisenhower Expressway was doing what the Eisenhower always does — moving cars fast through the flat stretch where the city bleeds into the suburbs. Then two vehicles collided near 25th Street, one of them rolled, and by the time Illinois State Police troopers reached the scene, a little boy was already gone.
The crash happened at approximately 11:10 a.m. in the westbound lanes of I-290, at the cluster of suburbs where Bellwood, Broadview, and Maywood all share a border. Two vehicles were involved. At least one overturned. When troopers arrived, they found one person dead at the scene and five others hurt badly enough to be taken to area hospitals. What sparked the collision is still unknown. Illinois State Police are actively investigating and have not released a cause.
The dead was not an adult. It was an 11-year-old boy named Iker Paredes, from Chicago’s West Town neighborhood, officially identified by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. A fourth grader at Talcott Fine Arts Academy. A young player with the Chicago City Soccer Club. A child. He was pronounced dead right there on the expressway, under the Sunday morning sky, before most of Chicago had finished their coffee.
All westbound lanes of the Eisenhower were shut down by 11:18 a.m. The closure stretched into the afternoon as investigators reconstructed the crash and documented the scene. Traffic was pushed off onto 17th Avenue. Lanes didn’t reopen until around 4 p.m. — nearly five hours after the crash. And disturbingly, this wasn’t even the first deadly wreck on the Eisenhower that Sunday. An earlier crash near Ashland Avenue in the pre-dawn hours had already sent people to hospitals and taken another life, making Sunday one of the bloodiest single days the expressway had seen in recent memory.
But what turned this particular story into something that grabbed the entire city’s chest was the identity of Iker’s family. His father is the man Chicagoans know simply as “The Tamale Guy” — the vendor who has spent years walking through bars and gathering spots across the city, warming people up with his presence and his food. He is a fixture. He is Chicago. And on Sunday, somebody took his son.
In the wake of the crash, people who know and love the family launched a GoFundMe under the name “Honoring Iker — Support The Tamale Guy Family.” The campaign was set up to cover what grief forces families to face immediately — funeral arrangements, cremation, and the kind of urgent expenses that don’t wait for heartbreak to pass. Donations poured in from a community that has known this family not as strangers, but as neighbors.
Illinois State Police say their investigation is ongoing. The facts will come in time — what caused the crash, what the vehicles were doing, who made what decision in those final seconds on the Eisenhower. But none of that brings back a fourth grader. None of it puts Iker Paredes back on a soccer field or back in a classroom at Talcott Fine Arts Academy. A family that has given so much to this city now needs the city to give something back. And Chicago, to its credit, is showing up.
