For nearly five years, Claudio Cossio’s friends and family wondered why someone would want to kill the 20-year-old UPS worker?
Cossio had no criminal past, they said, and no involvement in gangs. He was double-parked in the 4100 block of South Sacramento, waiting to pick up a friend to play basketball, when someone opened fire from a passing car on April 5, 2020.
On Tuesday, they learned Cossio and four other people were the victims of a monthslong killing spree by a teenage gunman.
The new charges were filed against Antonio Reyes, who has been in jail since he was 17 and allegedly killed a man after breaking up with a girlfriend. Prosecutors said they have linked at least eight attacks in all to Reyes during a nine-month span in 2020.
“It was like he was killing someone every month,” said Cossio’s mother, Nohemi Cossio.
She and the families of the other victims looked on from the courtroom gallery as Reyes, now 21, was led into Judge Mary Brosnahan’s courtroom at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse.
They had met for the first time in the state’s attorney’s victim services offices Tuesday morning, ahead of Reyes’ arraignment on the five murders.
“We knew that (Reyes) was locked up for killing somebody already, but we didn’t know about all these other murders,” Cossio said.
Reyes was 16 when he allegedly shot and killed Cossio in April. On Tuesday, he was also arraigned for the murders of Francisco Magana in March, Damian Duran in May, and Jose Martinez and Justin Gonzalez, killed a day apart in November 2020.
Reyes had previously been charged with attempted murder for a shooting that took place two weeks later, on Thanksgiving Day, that badly wounded a 27-year-old man in Gage Park.
Reyes, wearing a blue-green jumpsuit issued to high-risk detainees at the Cook County Jail, greeted the judge as he was led out of a holding cell to his seat beside Assistant Public Defender Kate Moriarty. In the courtroom gallery, some two dozen friends and relatives of Reyes’ alleged victims stared intently at him during the brief hearing.
Reyes has been in custody since he was arrested in December of 2020 for the murder of Luis Davalos Garcia that June.
Prosecutors alleged that Reyes shot the 26-year-old Davalos Garcia apparently at random, because he was angry after breaking up with a girlfriend.
According to prosecutors, Reyes announced he was going to “kill a King” before the shooting, though family members said Davalos Garcia was not a gang member.
While in the Cook County Jail awaiting trial on those charges, Reyes stabbed his cellmate repeatedly with a shank made from “a construction nail” in 2022, according to charging documents.
The alleged attack occurred shortly after Reyes had just turned 19, not long after he was transferred to the jail from the juvenile detention center.
Prosecutors also have charged a friend of Reyes in the murder of a witness in the Davalos Garcia killing. Andres Giler was charged in 2022 with the murder of 20-year-old Sebastian Serrano on Christmas Day 2021. Giler was with the gunman when Serrano was killed, and cellphone records indicated Giler had been messaging with Serrano at the time of the shooting. Giler pleaded guilty to lesser charges in 2022. It was not clear if the shooter has been charged.