The gun that Jason Nightengale used to kill four people and wound three others in a shooting spree across Chicago and Evanston on January 9 has been linked to other “shooting incidents” in the city, according to a Sun-Times report.
Ballistics tests, which compare unique microscopic marks that guns leave on bullets and shell casings, matched casings from Nightengale’s gun to casings found at other shooting scenes in Chicago, a CPD spokesperson confirmed for the paper.
CWBChicago reported the day after the shooting spree that police “are now looking at some of the city’s unsolved murder cases to see if there may be links to Nightengale.”
Police are working to determine how Nightengale got the gun, which has been on the street “a long, long time,” the paper said.
CPD has declined to identify individual crimes that Nightengale might be linked to. The department has specifically declined to comment on rumors that Nightengale might be responsible for two random slayings of men in the Rogers Park neighborhood.
Ballistics tests determined that the bullets used in those murders were fired by the same gun used weeks later in shootings near the United Center and Lawndale, the Chicago Tribune reported in 2019.
In the week before his shooting spree, Nightengale posted a series of disturbing videos to social media that showed him brandishing a gun and looking for people to victimize.
“I’m looking for somebody by themself, you know what I mean? Walking to their car,” Nightengale said in one video as he walked across a strip mall parking lot.
“It might be this guy,” he continues as he turns the camera toward an idling SUV with a driver sitting behind the wheel. “I might jack his ass. No. He looks like a problem…I don’t need no problem.”
Nightengale’s shooting spree ended when Evanston police killed him in a shoot-out. Three of his victims died on the day of the attacks. Last weekend, 61-year-old Marta Torres became his fourth murder victim.
Nightengale grabbed Torres inside an Evanston IHOP restaurant and shot her before he went outside and began shooting at responding officers in the parking lot of a General Dollar store.
