CHICAGO — Prosecutors on Saturday revealed the painstakingly detailed efforts Chicago police detectives made as they tried to solve the double murder of two students outside Innovations High School one year ago. Investigators scoured social media posts, phone records, auto theft reports, and countless hours of surveillance video to identify the three gunmen: one who died last year, another who has not yet been charged, and 22-year-old Tommie Coleman.
Coleman was in court for his first appearance as prosecutors laid out their case against him. At the end of the lengthy hearing, Judge William Fahy ordered Coleman detained pending trial.
Around 12:30 p.m. on January 26, 2024, childhood friends Monterio Williams, 17, Robert Boston, 16, and a group of other students walked out of Innovations onto the first block of North Wabash. As they approached the nearby CTA station, a stolen Infiniti SUV stopped on Wabash. Three gunmen jumped out of the car and fired shots for about 15 seconds, prosecutors said.
Both boys were killed. A bullet narrowly missed the 25-year-old woman who happened to be walking by. A bullet pierced her coat sleeve and fell into its lining.
Within hours, police received a tip that the now-deceased individual participated in the shooting, prosecutors said. A search warrant served on that individual’s Instagram account revealed a video that prosecutors suggest was recorded inside the stolen SUV about 18 minutes after the murders.
In the video, the deceased gunman “sang the verse of a song making references to being masked and armed with others in a stolen car and getting out and shooting at opposition,” prosecutors alleged. Detectives allegedly obtained another video that Coleman recorded in the SUV’s front seat while the now-dead gunman was recording his video in the back seat. Coleman’s video also showed all three suspects had guns, prosecutors said Saturday.
Video from the school showed an Innovations student suspected of being the still-uncharged gunman changing clothes and leaving campus about 90 minutes before the shooting, prosecutors said. Video and GPS data from his phone allegedly showed he boarded a CTA train to Roosevelt and then walked to a nearby parking garage, where video shows he got into the stolen Infiniti.
In fact, prosecutors said, location data from all three suspects’ phones showed their devices tracked together before, during, and after the murders.
Coleman was arrested on Wednesday. He is charged with two counts of first-degree murder, attempted murder, aggravated discharge of a firearm toward an occupied vehicle, being a felon in possession of a firearm, and failure to register as a gun offender. Prosecutors said he has two cases pending in Indiana, one for auto theft and another for possessing a machine gun. He was convicted of unlawful possession of a weapon in DuPage County in 2021, they said.
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