A Pullman man charged in the fatal shooting of two Loop high school students last year was seen with two others on videos posted to Instagram wearing masks and riding in a stolen SUV before and after they “ambushed” the teens, prosecutors said.
Tommie Coleman, 22, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder and one count each of attempted murder, aggravated discharge of a firearm and unlawful use of a weapon by a convicted felon.
Judge William Fahy ordered Coleman detained Saturday for what he called a “horrific offense.”
“The defendant and his cohorts ambushed teenagers,” Fahy said during the hearing. “It doesn’t get much more violent than that.”
Coleman was arrested Wednesday and is accused of being one of the people who fatally shot Robert Boston, 16, and Monterio Williams, 17, around 12:30 p.m. on Jan. 26, 2024, outside Innovations High School. The shooting occurred in the first block of North Wabash Avenue, a couple blocks from Millennium Park.
He and two others — including a man who died in June 2024 and an Innovations High School student who has yet to be charged — got out of a stolen SUV and ambushed the teens, firing their guns for 15 seconds, prosecutors said. Boston was shot six times and Williams was shot three times; 22 shell casings fired from three different weapons were recovered at the scene.
Prosecutors said the teens were targets but did not explain why. They also did not go into detail about why the other Innovations student hasn’t been charged.
A bullet was also recovered from the jacket sleeve of a woman standing nearby, who was left with a bruise, and a CTA elevator door and a beam supporting a CTA platform were also hit.
Surveillance video and license plate readers captured the Innovations student who hasn’t been charged leaving school early and entering the SUV in a parking lot, before it circled the school’s doors twice and eventually parked nearby and waited for several minutes, prosecutors said. The trio’s phone records also tied them to the movement of the vehicle and scene of the shooting.
The night of the shooting, Chicago police received a tip from one of the victims’ mothers that a student at the school had sent her videos Coleman and others had posted on Instagram of them wearing masks and riding in the SUV before and after the shooting, at one point singing about wearing masks and shooting someone, prosecutors said.
The videos were obtained through search warrants, and a witness of the shooting identified the student who was in the SUV.
Coleman’s attorney argued the videos hadn’t been offered up to the defense and that the witnesses had known and identified the uncharged student, not Coleman. She pointed out witnesses ran for cover during the “chaotic incident,” and no one had identified Coleman in the car.
“We haven’t seen any of these videos that connect my client,” public defender Erica Green said. “There is very little physical evidence.”
Coleman was previously convicted of unlawful use of a weapon by a felon in DuPage County, for which he was sentenced to two years, and has pending warrants on an auto theft and possession of a machine gun out of Lake County, Indiana, prosecutors said. He also has a trespass to vehicle in Chicago.
Coleman is due back in court Wednesday.