A man now charged with six killings on the Southwest Side in 2020 was labeled “a serial killer” Wednesday by officials who said he didn’t know any of the victims and targeted a car carrying three children in one of the attacks.
Antonio Reyes, 21, was being held in Cook County Jail for a murder from June 2020 when he was charged this month with five other murders between March 2 and Nov. 9, 2020, Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling told reporters gathered at Public Safety Headquarters.
“This speaks to the level of disregard this offender had toward human life,” Snelling said. “It’s difficult to comprehend how anyone could easily take someone’s life, and especially so many in one year.”
Reyes has been in custody since he was arrested in December 2020 in the murder of Luis Davalos Garcia that June. He was between the ages of 16 and 17 when he allegedly committed the six slayings he’s charged in. While he was being held at the Cook County Jail, Reyes was charged with stabbing his cellmate with a shank in 2022.
Reyes was arraigned Tuesday in the 2020 murders of Claudio Cossio in April, Francisco Magana in March, Damian Duran in May, and Jose Martinez and Justin Gonzalez, killed a day apart in November.
“None of these people had ever met Antonio Reyes before, and there’s no reason to suspect Antonio Reyes had any reason to target them,” Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke said, referring to the victims of what she described as “serial murders.”
O’Neill Burke noted that Martinez was taking his family to buy a new puppy when he was gunned down. Snelling said the 31-year-old man was “killed in a barrage of bullets” in front of his three children, ages 3 to 9.
Another victim was shot and killed while going to a gas station, O’Neill Burke said, and a third was killed in a parked car on Palm Sunday.
“We have one extremely violent shooter who has been taken off the street today,” O’Neill Burke said. “Justice will be served, and that is a good thing. But we have a lot more work to do.”
Garien Gatewood, the deputy mayor for community safety, credited detectives’ work “to remove a serial killer from the streets.”
Chief of Detective Antionette Ursitti said there were two major breaks in the investigation: linking a .40-caliber handgun recovered in summer 2020 to multiple shootings, and using Reyes’ “social media footprint” to directly connect him to some of the slayings.
Snelling indicated police will “continue to work on cases” involving Reyes. Ursitti noted that detectives “are going to continue to look at additional cases to see associates that he may have been with and their role in those incidents.”
At his arraignment Tuesday, Reyes wore a blue-green jumpsuit issued to high-risk detainees at Cook County Jail as he was led out of a holding cell to his seat beside his assistant public defender.
In the courtroom gallery, some two dozen friends and relatives of Reyes’ alleged victims stared intently at him during the brief hearing.
“We knew that [Reyes] was locked up for killing somebody already, but we didn’t know about all these other murders,” said Cossio’s mother, Nohemi Cossio. “It was like he was killing someone every month.”
Reyes had previously been charged with attempted murder for another shooting on Thanksgiving Day in 2020 that badly wounded a 27-year-old man in Gage Park.
Two men have also been charged with killing a man who witnessed the murder of Davalos Garcia — the first victim Reyes was charged with killing.