Chicago Man Charged With Six Murders When He Was A Teenager

A man in Chicago allegedly randomly killed six people over a nine-month period in 2020. The suspect was a teenager at the time he carried out the killings.

He was already in custody at Cook County Jail for allegedly murdering Luis Davalos-Garcia, 26, in June 2020. Authorities have since charged him with five additional murders. Eileen O’Neill Burke described the crimes as “serial murders.”

On April 22, Larry Snelling of the Chicago Police Department announced that Antonio Reyes had been charged with five felony counts of first-degree murder and four felony counts of attempted first-degree murder. The charges stem from the killings of a 31-year-old man on March 2, 2020; a 21-year-old man on April 5, 2020; a 16-year-old boy on May 1, 2020; a 31-year-old man on Nov. 8, 2020; and a 20-year-old man on Nov. 9, 2020.

He is also facing charges for the attempted murder of another victim on April 5, 2020, and the attempted murder of three children, ages 3 to 9, on Nov. 8, 2020. According to Snelling, the three children were in the same car with an adult male who was “killed in a barrage of bullets.”

Antoinette Ursitti said at a news conference that a breakthrough in the investigation came after the discovery of shell casings from a .40-caliber handgun in 2020. The evidence was linked to a weapon used in other crime scenes. She noted that investigators had to “comb through an immense amount of physical and digital evidence” to place Reyes at the scenes.

Snelling told reporters, “When we are dealing with someone this violent, we have to remove them from the streets. This started when Mr. Reyes was a teenager.”

Antonio Reyes was first charged in the death of Luis Davalos-Garcia. According to WGN-TV, the victim was parked outside his girlfriend’s house with a “baby on board” sign in his car window when Reyes shot him to death. Although a motive remains unclear, investigators said he may have been upset about a recent breakup.

“None of these people had ever met Antonio Reyes before, and there’s no reason to suspect Antonio Reyes had any reason to target them, but that’s exactly what he did,” Eileen O’Neill Burke said at a news conference.

She added that after Reyes was taken into custody, he tried to kill his cellmate with a shank inside Cook County Jail in 2022. He has since pleaded not guilty to the new charges, according to CNN.

Reyes is set to appear in court on March 18.