On Wednesday, February 26, 2025, Chicago's police superintendent and the Cook County state's attorney stood together at police headquarters and described six killings from 2020 that, they said, had been committed by one teenager. The victims were a man walking home, a UPS worker waiting to pick up a friend, a sixteen-year-old boy, a marketing representative waiting outside his girlfriend's house, a father driving his three children and a twenty-year-old waiting for his girlfriend. All were shot on the city's Southwest Side between March and November 2020. "None of these people had ever met Antonio Reyes before," State's Attorney Eileen O'Neill Burke said, "and there's no reason to suspect Antonio Reyes had any reason to target them."
Reyes was twenty-one by then. He had been in custody since December 2020, held on a charge of murder in one of the six killings. The day before the news conference he had been arraigned on five more murder charges and four counts of attempted murder, and he had pleaded not guilty. As of October 2026, he has not been tried in any of the cases, and he is presumed innocent of every charge described below. What follows is what police, prosecutors and the families have said in public, and what the defense has said in reply.
The killings were spread across a few square miles of Gage Park, Brighton Park, West Lawn and Chicago Lawn, largely Latino neighborhoods on the Southwest Side. According to police and court records reported by CBS News Chicago, WTTW and ABC7, the scenes were on West 59th Street, South Sacramento Avenue, South Homan Avenue, South Rockwell Street and again West 59th Street, several of them within walking distance of one another.
Very little about Reyes's early life has been made public. The articles that cover the case do not name his schools or describe his childhood. What has been reported comes mostly from court proceedings. Prosecutors have described him as a member of the Latin Kings street gang, and court documents cited by the Chicago Sun-Times say he went by the nickname "Redrum," which is "murder" spelled backward.
He had a juvenile record before the first killing. Juvenile records are confidential in Illinois, and the police chief of detectives, Antoinette Ursitti, said at the 2025 news conference that she was limited in what she could say about them. CWBChicago, a Chicago crime news site, reported what prosecutors had disclosed at his first bond hearing in December 2020: that in December 2019 a juvenile court had given him three years of probation for aggravated robbery and aggravated battery, and that during 2020 he had picked up four more juvenile cases, for armed robbery, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, unlawful use of a weapon and a narcotics offense. According to CWBChicago, he was on pretrial release in a felony case when two of the 2020 shootings happened.
The Sun-Times reported one more detail from court records about his family. In March 2023, his mother, then thirty-seven, called 911 to report that a man was chasing her with a gun. One of the officers who responded, Andrés Vásquez Lasso, was shot and killed while chasing an eighteen-year-old, Steven Montano, whom court records describe as her boyfriend. Montano was convicted of first-degree murder in July 2025 and sentenced to natural life in prison that December, according to CBS News Chicago. Reyes, who was already in jail, had no part in that case.
The first killing came on March 2, 2020, in the 2600 block of West 59th Street, near Washtenaw Avenue in Gage Park. Francisco Magana was thirty-one. His name appears as Magana in the Sun-Times and WGN reports and as Mangana in CBS, ABC7 and CWBChicago reports.
ABC7 reported that he was on his way home from work. At Reyes's detention hearing in April 2025, prosecutors said he had just bought a soft drink at a gas station and was crossing the street when Reyes and another person walked up and opened fire. Witnesses told police there were two shooters, and that one of them fired again after Magana fell, stopping only when the other shouted that it was over. Reyes is the only person charged in the killing.
His sister, Bernice Mangana, went to court in March 2025. She told ABC7 that the killing had affected the whole family, that her mother was suffering greatly and that she wanted to see the person responsible sentenced so the ordeal could end. "We never met this individual," a relative said, "never see this individual in our lives."
Prosecutors have offered a motive for this first killing that has nothing to do with the man who died. They said in April 2025 that Reyes was frustrated with his own gang, and had told a witness that its members "were lame for not doing enough shootings."
April 5, 2020, was Palm Sunday. That afternoon Claudio Cossio, a UPS worker, was double-parked in the 4100 block of South Sacramento Avenue in Brighton Park, waiting to pick up a friend to play basketball. A car pulled up beside his and someone opened fire. Cossio was killed. Another man was wounded in the same shooting, and that wounding is one of the attempted murder charges.
Most reports give Cossio's age as twenty-one; the Sun-Times gave it as twenty. His mother, Nohemi Cossio, told WGN that he was six foot two and gentle, a loving son, brother and father, and that he would have turned twenty-six in 2025. He had a young daughter. The girl's mother, Erika Avalos, told NBC Chicago that he was killed two days before their daughter's second birthday.
At the April 2025 hearing, prosecutors said Reyes and two other people had been driving around looking for members of a rival gang when Reyes fired into Cossio's car, and that Reyes later made a video in which he reenacted the shooting. Cossio's family has said that neither he nor they knew Reyes.
"A piece of my heart is gone," Nohemi Cossio told ABC7 after the 2025 charges were announced. She said the news was bittersweet and brought back the first days after his death, and that she felt justice would be served. "It's a wound that will never heal," she told WGN. "I will never stop crying for my son." To the Sun-Times she said that it felt as if he had been killing someone every month.
Damian Duran was sixteen. Unlike the other victims, he knew Reyes. His mother, Marlen Rangel, told the Sun-Times that her son had been friends with Reyes for several months in 2020, and that she had met Reyes a few weeks before May 1. She did not like him. When he came to pick her son up, she said, she ran out to the car and confronted him, and told him she knew what car he drove and had his license plate.
On May 1, 2020, according to Rangel's account to the Sun-Times, a ride-hailing driver picked Damian up at her home. She believes Reyes arranged the ride because he knew she was watching who came to the house. CBS News Chicago reported her as saying she saw her son get into a car with Reyes that day; the two accounts differ on that point. Later that day Damian was found shot to death in an alley in the 5200 block of South Homan Avenue. Witnesses said the gunman wore a gray hooded sweatshirt and ran down the alley.
Hours after he left home, detectives came to Rangel's door and asked about her son's tattoos. "It was a shock," she told CBS, "because my son never really went with anybody he did not know." Panicking, she had her daughter reach Reyes on Snapchat. Reyes wrote back that he had dropped Damian off on 55th Street. Rangel told him he was lying, that detectives had been at the house and that her son was dead. The last message she said she received from him was that her son was going to "rot in hell." Police said that exchange became one of the pieces that connected Reyes to the killing.
At the April 2025 hearing, prosecutors said Reyes shot Duran in the alley and took drugs he was carrying, then offered the drugs to a witness and asked for more bullets, saying he had emptied his gun. "These young men did not deserve this," Rangel said when the charges were announced. She told the Sun-Times she had nearly given up hope that anyone would be charged and was glad when Reyes was arrested.
Luis Davalos Garcia was twenty-six. The Sun-Times described him as a marketing representative with no criminal record. On the evening of June 24, 2020, he was sitting in his parked car outside his girlfriend's home in the 5800 block of South Rockwell Street in Gage Park, waiting for her. (A 2020 Sun-Times Media Wire report published by Fox 32 gave the 5000 block; later police and court records give the 5800 block.) A car pulled alongside and shots were fired. He was hit in the head. His girlfriend found him, and he died at a hospital.
At the December 2020 bond hearing, as reported by the Sun-Times Media Wire, prosecutors said Reyes was upset because his girlfriend had broken up with him, and that he told her he was going "to go kill a King right now." The Sun-Times later reported that the message was sent minutes before the shooting, together with a photo of Reyes holding a gun, and WGN reported a video, sent to a person who became a witness, showing him driving with a laser-sighted gun. Prosecutors described the car as a silver sedan with distinctive wraparound taillights and a "baby on board" placard in the rear window, belonging to his former girlfriend, and said a private surveillance camera across the street recorded it passing Davalos Garcia's car at least once before it stopped and the shots were fired. The Sun-Times identified the car as a Lincoln MKZ. CWBChicago reported that investigators traced its temporary plate to an auto body shop that had sold the car to the mother of Reyes's child four days earlier, and that about four hours after the killing a similar car was involved in another shooting in which two people were wounded. Reyes has not been charged in that second shooting.
Davalos Garcia did not know Reyes. His father, Luis Davalos, flew in from Texas for the February 2025 arraignment. He told the Sun-Times it was a shock to see the accused man in person for the first time.
Police said in 2025 that a .40-caliber handgun was recovered after this shooting. It became the central physical link in the case.
In November 2020, Jose Martinez, thirty-one, was driving with his three children, aged three to nine, near 55th Street and South Homan Avenue. Police and court records give the date as November 8. The family was on its way to pick up a puppy. According to the Sun-Times, prosecutors said in April 2025 that the children were in the car waiting while Martinez's wife went to get the puppy, and that Reyes drove past, flashed a gang sign, then came back and fired five shots into the car. The children were not hit. Prosecutors charged Reyes with three counts of attempted murder, one for each child.
Martinez survived the shooting itself. O'Neill Burke said he was severely wounded in front of his children and died months later; the Sun-Times reported prosecutors as saying he lived for roughly a year. "These children were in a vehicle with the adult victim who was killed in a barrage of bullets," O'Neill Burke said.
That April 2025 Sun-Times report gives the date of this shooting as November 11, 2020, three days later than the police date. The discrepancy has not been explained in public.
The next day, November 9, 2020, by the police account, Justin Gonzalez, twenty, was sitting in his car in the 4700 block of West 59th Street in West Lawn, waiting to pick up his girlfriend. Prosecutors said Reyes followed him there, pulled up beside him and opened fire, and afterward sent a witness a video of the scene. The Sun-Times spelled his surname Gonzales in one report, and gave the date as November 12 in the report of the April 2025 hearing. Like the others, he had no known connection to Reyes.
On Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 2020, a man was shot in Gage Park and survived. According to the account prosecutors gave in December 2020, as reported by CWBChicago and the Sun-Times, the twenty-seven-year-old had noticed two men in a Jeep following and staring at him near 58th Street and Central Park Avenue, and minutes later the bullet grazed his scalp. The gunman wore a surgical mask, and the man identified Reyes by his eyes, eyebrows and forehead. He told police he had never seen Reyes before that day.
Police found the Jeep abandoned two days later, according to CWBChicago, with a shell casing under a windshield wiper that had a "high correlation" to casings from the scene. The Jeep was registered to Reyes's grandmother, who had reported it stolen. WGN, citing a bond proffer, reported that surveillance cameras recorded a Jeep Compass and that an officer recognized the suspect from earlier encounters. The same WGN report described the victim, in the proffer, as a seventeen-year-old boy shot outside a convenience store at 59th Street and St. Louis Avenue. The published accounts of this shooting do not agree with one another, and the difference has not been resolved in the coverage.
Reyes was arrested in December 2020, at seventeen, and charged with first-degree murder in the death of Luis Davalos Garcia, and with attempted murder and aggravated battery in the Thanksgiving shooting. Because of COVID-19 restrictions, the charge was read by video. On December 7, 2020, a Cook County judge ordered him held without bail on the murder charge and set bail at $500,000 on the attempted murder case. He has been in custody ever since, first in juvenile detention and later in Cook County Jail.
At that point police considered him a suspect in several other killings but did not have enough to charge him. Over the next four years, as the Sun-Times put it, detectives built the other cases "through ballistics and social media messages."
One more killing is connected to the case, though Reyes is not charged with it. Sebastian Serrano, who lived a few blocks from Marlen Rangel and who had also been a friend of Reyes, was expected to testify against him in the Davalos Garcia case. According to charging documents described by the Sun-Times, shortly after his arrest Reyes called an eighteen-year-old friend, George Reyes, from juvenile detention and told him to "take care of" Serrano. Prosecutors say the two Reyeses are not related. A nineteen-year-old, Andres Giler, lured Serrano out of his home with texts and calls, and was on the phone with him when George Reyes shot him.
George Reyes and Giler both pleaded guilty to murder. George Reyes received twenty-two years in prison in December 2024 under an agreement with prosecutors, according to the Sun-Times. "They all knew each other," Rangel said.
In November 2022, while awaiting trial, Reyes allegedly attacked his cellmate in Cook County Jail with a shank made from a construction nail. He was charged with attempted first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and aggravated battery causing great bodily harm. That case is pending. When O'Neill Burke described it in 2025, she said he "allegedly tried to kill his cell mate."
Police have described three main strands of evidence, though most of it has not yet been tested in court.
The first is the gun. Chief of Detectives Ursitti said the .40-caliber handgun recovered in the summer of 2020 was a "significant" development: when it was test-fired and processed, casings from other scenes matched it, which showed "a relationship to other scenes." CBS News Chicago reported the gun was recovered after the June shooting.
The second is social media. Ursitti said Reyes's online footprint was "fairly significant" in tying him to the shootings, and CWBChicago reported that investigators matched some of his posts to shooting locations. The messages to his former girlfriend before the Davalos Garcia killing, the video of the Cossio reenactment and the video of the Gonzalez scene all came from his own accounts or phone, according to prosecutors.
The third is people. Surveillance video, community tips and witnesses who say Reyes spoke to them about the shootings are all part of the state's case. Marlen Rangel's Snapchat exchange is one piece. George Reyes, by now a convicted murderer himself, is a prosecution witness. CBS News Chicago reported that detectives were still looking at whether Reyes was involved in other shootings, and Ursitti said they would examine what role, if any, his associates played.
Police Superintendent Larry Snelling said detectives had "investigated these cases for more than four years in the memory of the victims." At the February 2025 news conference he said, "These are six lives that were brutally taken," and spoke of the level of disregard for human life the cases showed. Ursitti said the department now regarded many of the cases as closed.
On the morning of Tuesday, February 25, 2025, according to the Chicago Police Department's release, Reyes was arrested in the 2600 block of South California Avenue, the address of Cook County Jail, where he was already held. He was charged with five counts of first-degree murder, for Magana, Cossio, Duran, Martinez and Gonzalez, and four counts of attempted first-degree murder, for the man wounded with Cossio and the three Martinez children. He was arraigned the same day.
Nearly two dozen relatives and friends of the victims came to the brief hearing, the Sun-Times reported, and some families met one another for the first time that morning. Reyes appeared with a public defender, in the blue-green jumpsuit the jail issues to high-risk detainees, and pleaded not guilty.
"It's sad to think about a 17-year-old committing serial murders over the course of nine months," O'Neill Burke said the next day. She described the victims' last moments as police understood them: one had gone to a gas station early in the evening to buy a soft drink, one was sitting in a car with a friend on Palm Sunday, and one was taking his family to buy a puppy. "We have an extremely violent shooter who was taken off the street," she said. Garien Gatewood, Chicago's deputy mayor for community safety, credited the detectives.
Prosecutors asked a judge to order Reyes held on the new charges. His detention hearing was set for March 18, 2025, and was postponed so his public defender could prepare. Members of Francisco Magana's family came to court that day anyway.
The hearing was held on April 24, 2025, before Cook County Judge Mary M. Brosnahan. Prosecutors laid out the five newer cases in detail, as summarized above. They also told the judge about what they described as admissions Reyes made to other people: that shooting people aroused him sexually and then made him hungry, and that he liked to return to the scenes to film them and to break up and urinate on the memorials left for the dead. The Sun-Times reported that prosecutors attributed these statements to admissions Reyes made, without saying how they were recorded. Reyes said nothing during the hearing.
Assistant Public Defender Kate Moriarty argued that the state's cases were weak. Its witness lists, she said, included convicted felons and a "career jailhouse snitch" who had posed as a dead gang leader to get information. She said George Reyes's words were "not worth the pieces of paper they're written on," pointing out that he had made a deal with prosecutors and had himself been identified as a suspect in two of the killings without being charged.
Brosnahan ordered Reyes detained in all five cases. His next court date was set for June 2, 2025.
Antonio Reyes remains in Cook County Jail, charged with six murders and multiple attempted murders and awaiting trial. He has pleaded not guilty in every case. The research for this page found no report of a trial date, a plea agreement or a verdict through October 2026; the most recent published coverage that could be found described the April 2025 detention hearing. He has not been convicted of any of the killings, and the evidence described by police and prosecutors has not yet been tested before a jury.
He was sixteen and seventeen at the time of the killings, and his cases are being heard in adult court. The cellmate case from 2022, when he was an adult, is pending alongside them.
Everything about the six killings is, for now, an allegation. The following distinctions matter.
Charged: six counts of first-degree murder, one per victim; attempted murder of the man wounded with Claudio Cossio, of the three Martinez children, of the Thanksgiving 2020 shooting victim and of his jail cellmate.
Not charged: the June 24, 2020 shooting about four hours after the Davalos Garcia killing, in which two people were wounded; the killing of Sebastian Serrano, for which George Reyes and Andres Giler pleaded guilty; any other shootings police have said they are reviewing.
Contested: the defense says the state's witnesses are unreliable, in particular George Reyes, who struck a deal with prosecutors. Police have said they believe Reyes was the sole gunman, but witnesses in the Magana killing described two shooters, and prosecutors have said other people were in the car in the Cossio shooting. Whether others will be charged is open.
Random or not: officials have described the victims as chosen at random, with no connection to Reyes. That is true of most of them by every account, but Damian Duran had been his friend for months, and Sebastian Serrano, killed after the arrest, had been his friend as well. Prosecutors have given specific motives in two cases: the breakup in the Davalos Garcia killing and, in the Duran killing, the theft of drugs.
Details in dispute between sources: the dates of the Martinez and Gonzalez shootings (November 8 and 9 in police records, November 11 and 12 in the April 2025 hearing report); the age of Claudio Cossio (21 or 20); the spelling of Magana or Mangana and of Gonzalez or Gonzales; how long Jose Martinez lived after he was shot; and the age and location given for the Thanksgiving shooting victim.
The "serial killer" label has come from police and prosecutors at the charging stage, not from a court.
December 2019: Reyes, then a juvenile, is given three years of probation for aggravated robbery and aggravated battery, according to CWBChicago.
March 2, 2020: Francisco Magana, 31, is shot to death in the 2600 block of West 59th Street.
April 5, 2020 (Palm Sunday): Claudio Cossio, 21, is shot to death in the 4100 block of South Sacramento Avenue; another man is wounded.
May 1, 2020: Damian Duran, 16, is found shot to death in an alley in the 5200 block of South Homan Avenue.
June 24, 2020: Luis Davalos Garcia, 26, is shot to death outside his girlfriend's home in the 5800 block of South Rockwell Street. A .40-caliber handgun is later recovered.
November 8, 2020: Jose Martinez, 31, is shot in the 5400 block of South Homan Avenue with his three children in the car; he dies months later.
November 9, 2020: Justin Gonzalez, 20, is shot to death in the 4700 block of West 59th Street.
November 26, 2020: a man is grazed by a bullet in Gage Park in the Thanksgiving shooting.
December 2020: Reyes, 17, is arrested and charged with the Davalos Garcia murder and the Thanksgiving attempted murder; on December 7 he is ordered held without bail.
After December 2020: Sebastian Serrano, a friend expected to testify, is shot to death. George Reyes and Andres Giler later plead guilty.
November 2022: Reyes allegedly attacks his cellmate in Cook County Jail with a sharpened construction nail and is charged with attempted murder.
March 1, 2023: Officer Andrés Vásquez Lasso is killed responding to a 911 call from Reyes's mother's home; Steven Montano is later convicted.
December 2024: George Reyes is sentenced to twenty-two years for the Serrano murder.
February 25, 2025: Reyes is charged in custody with five more murders and four attempted murders, and pleads not guilty.
February 26, 2025: Police and prosecutors announce the charges at a news conference.
March 18, 2025: the detention hearing is postponed.
April 24, 2025: Judge Mary M. Brosnahan orders Reyes detained in all five newer cases.
October 2026: Reyes remains in custody awaiting trial; no trial or verdict reported.