Demetris Johnson made headlines in 2011 when, at the age of 16, prosecutors charged him as an adult with fatally shooting a man in a parking lot near his home. A jury acquitted him.
As a grown-up, he continued to accumulate criminal cases. He was convicted of illegal gun possession twice in 2015. Then, in 2021, while wearing an ankle monitor for pending armed habitual criminal and escape cases, he allegedly murdered a man in his family’s apartment complex, about a half-mile from Chicago police headquarters.
On Monday, Judge William Gamboney sentenced Johnson to 60 years in prison for that slaying.
Prosecutors said Johnson’s mother called CPD to their apartment in the 3500 block of South Cottage Grove Avenue because he had a gun and was experiencing a mental health episode on the afternoon of January 27, 2021. His mother told police Johnson was hearing voices.
Another caller reported hearing gunshots in the building, and security officers found Gino Dameron, 26, dead in an elevator with multiple gunshot wounds.
Surveillance video showed Johnson with a gun in the building lobby before the shooting and carrying a gun in a stairwell afterward. Cameras also captured Johnson running out the back of the building as police arrived, prosecutors said.
While officers were investigating the murder, they received a tip that the killer had boarded a southbound CTA bus on Cottage Grove and had just exited at 46th Street, according to a CPD report. Officers responded to the area and found Johnson wearing clothing identical to the shooter’s, police records said.
He was also wearing an electronic monitoring ankle bracelet in the pending gun case, even though he had previously escaped electronic monitoring in that matter, court records show.
That armed habitual criminal case, which remains pending, stemmed from a traffic stop in the Washington Heights neighborhood on April 29, 2018.
Police said a car came to a stop and Johnson bolted from the passenger seat while holding his waistband. Officers chased him and brought him back to the vehicle, where they allegedly found a loaded ammunition magazine lying next to the car. Firefighters were called to the scene so officers could use a ladder to search the roof of a nearby building that Johnson had run past. A firefighter found a handgun on the roof, police said.
The gun had one bullet in the chamber but no magazine, according to a CPD report. Investigators said the magazine found next to the car fit the rooftop gun, and its bullets matched the round found in the chamber.
Prosecutors charged Johnson with armed habitual criminal, unlawful use of a weapon by a felon with a previous gun conviction, and failure to register as a gun offender.
He was released on electronic monitoring after posting a $3,000 deposit. Prosecutors later charged him with escape after he failed to appear in court in September 2019, and a judge ordered him detained.
But another judge, whose name was not clearly identified in court files, reduced the monetary conditions of release in June 2020 and allowed Johnson to return home on electronic monitoring after his aunt posted $20,000, records show.
Both the armed habitual criminal and escape cases remain pending.
But earlier this year, a jury convicted Johnson of two counts of murder in Dameron’s killing. On Monday, Gamboney handed him the 60-year sentence, court records show. Johnson must serve 100% of the sentence.
Since being jailed on the murder charge, Johnson has continued to pick up cases while in custody. One case charged him with two counts of aggravated battery of a peace officer. Three others, filed separately, charged him with one count each of aggravated battery of a peace officer, and another charged him with being a felon in possession of a weapon in a penal institution. Prosecutors dropped all of those cases on Monday.
According to a contemporaneous Chicago Tribune report, prosecutors charged Johnson in adult court in January 2011 with killing 23-year-old Zohntill Lemon in a parking lot in the 3500 block of South Lake Park Avenue, less than a block from where Dameron was killed. He was eventually acquitted.
When police arrested Johnson in that case, he was already being held in the county’s juvenile detention facility on charges of aggravated battery to a school official at Dunbar High School, the Tribune reported.
