After a night of club-hopping, as the clock approached 4 a.m. this Sunday, Roberto Ramos and his friends decided to try a late-closing bar they'd never been to in Gladstone Park.

They never made it inside.

At the entrance to Zachary's For Cocktails at 5368 North Milwaukee Avenue, Ramos, his brother-in-law and a friend came up on a heated argument between two groups that ended in a burst of gunfire that seriously injured three men, including the two friends with Ramos. Just as it started to register that they'd walked straight into the middle of a conflict, without warning, someone tackled Ramos from behind.

"We just got out of the car, we walked to the door and the fight escalated right there. It all happened so fast," Ramos said. "If we were there 30 seconds, that's how long it took from the car to the door, and that's how fast it escalated. Just suddenly, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom," Ramos said of the gunfire.

Dazed, he got to his feet and realized somehow he ended up half a block from his brother-in-law and friend.

"People were running and the guy was shooting and aiming at people and people were just running off in different ways," Ramos said. "I got up to see who was the guy who tackled me. That's when I realized the guy was already shooting and had already shot people. I tried talking to my friend — he was like, 'I can't feel my legs;' my brother-in-law was down the block, laying on the ground also. He was shot."

A 30-year-old man was shot in the chest and taken to Lutheran General Hospital; another man, 50, was shot in the back and he was taken to Lutheran General; a 51-year-old man was taken to Illinois Masonic with a gunshot wound to the thigh, police said. The 50- and 51-year-old were with Ramos, he said.

Photos from the scene of a triple shooting that happened in the 5300 block of North Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago around 4 a.m. on Sunday, May 21, 2017. (Stacey Wescott) (Stacey Wescott)

An account from the Chicago Police Department on their media notification system gives a slightly different account, calling the victims – Ramos' friends – the agitators.

Authorities report the "victims were walking on the sidewalk when they began fighting with several other males," and police add that the gunman "came out of the lounge and started shooting."

The owner of the bar isn't a man named Zachary, but rather Hal Steinke, 72, who says his bar has been open until 4 a.m., seven nights a week, for 40 years — without incident. Steinke says his bar isn't all that big, 35 to 40 customers at once would be a nice-sized crowd for the place. He doesn't think the gunman was ever in the bar; his understanding was that the whole skirmish started and ended outside and none of the victims or offenders were patrons of Zachary's that night.

Steinke doesn't have any plans to change things at his bar. Metal detectors would be an extreme response and he has no interest in purchasing them. He feels the neighborhood remains a safe place and that this act of violence isn't a reflection of crime in Gladstone Park.

"I don't see that the neighborhood is changing for the worse, or it's becoming a bad neighborhood. I just think it was a freak thing," he said. "'Random,' I guess, is probably a better word: It was a random thing. We're normally a nice, peaceful place."

Ramos said his friends remained in the hospital Sunday afternoon and he's hopeful for a full recovery.

The gunman is not in custody and the case remains under investigation.

"Whether it's a one-time thing, whether it's a gang-related thing, I don't know. It's just something that happened, and why it happened we have no idea," Steinke said.

kdouglas@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @312BreakingNews