A pair of Cook County juries found two men guilty of killing 7-year-old Amari Brown just hours after closing arguments in their trials on Thursday.
Jamal Joiner, 29, and Rasheed Martin, 28, each faced one count of murder in the death of Amari after they opened fire on a crowded street on July 4, 2015, as well as counts of attempted murder for wounding a woman and firing at a man who prosecutors said was the true target of the attack.
Both men were found guilty on all three counts.
Amari was shot in the back as he watched fireworks, the unintended victim of what Cook County prosecutors said was an attack stemming from a longstanding gang conflict in the neighborhood that had been ongoing for months and included a different shooting earlier the same day.
Joiner and Martin have been tried separately but in tandem since their trials started last week at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse in Little Village. Both cases were presided over by Judge Nicholas Kantas, but had different juries as each man pointed the finger at the other in their defense.
“This ends today, here with all of you,” Assistant State’s Attorney Emily Stevens told the jury in Martin’s case Thursday evening in closing arguments.
The jury in Joiner’s case returned their verdict about six hours after being sent out for deliberations; the jury in Martin’s case returned the second verdict minutes later after more than three hours of consideration.
Earlier Thursday, an assistant public defender said that Martin had only fired a single shot in the air, referring to statements made to police by two witnesses to the shooting as a reaction to hearing gunshots. He then ran. He didn’t shoot at anyone, she said.
Evidence experts testified at the trials that investigators recovered six shell casings at the scene of the shooting — five from one gun and a single casing from a second gun.
It was Joiner who had continued to fire bullets down the street into a crowd of people, the public defender alleged.
Which gun had fired which bullets and who was carrying them are still unknown.
“Who’s is to say [Martin] didn’t fire the five shots?” Assistant State’s Attorney Emily Stevens quickly countered on rebuttal.
But prosecutors also argued that it didn’t really matter which man pulled the trigger, sending the bullet from the barrel of a gun that took Amari’s life.
Both men armed themselves with 9-mm handguns and opened fire with the intention of killing someone that night and should have known their actions — firing repeatedly on a busy street filled with people celebrating Independence Day — could have caused someone’s death, prosecutors told jurors.
Complicating the decision for the juries was a parade of witnesses who took the stand and allegedly walked back earlier statements or said they no longer recalled what happened.
Defense attorneys called those witnesses unreliable, noting some were convicted felons. Others, they said, were facing charges and trying to help their own cases.
They also noted that Amari’s father, Antonio Brown, was notably missing from the list of people who testified.
Brown faced intense criticism from former Chicago Police Supt. Garry McCarthy and Mayor Rahm Emanuel for allegedly not aiding police in their investigation of the shooting — a claim Brown’s attorney had rejected at the time. Police also insisted that the bullet that killed the boy was intended for his father, though prosecutors have said during the trial that a different man was the intended target.
Prosecutors told jurors to rely on the testimony the witnesses gave at the start of the cases when they appeared before grand juries and to use their judgment to determine if the witnesses were telling the truth then — when they recounted many details of what they had seen — as opposed to their more recent claims that they could no longer recall what had happened.
Coupled with the murder months later of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee, who was lured to a South Side alley and executed as revenge for an earlier shooting, the pair of horrific crimes drew national attention to the city’s senseless gun violence.
Hundreds of people attended the 7-year-old’s funeral.
During the service, then U.S. Sen. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., and U.S. Rep. Danny Davis, D-Ill., offered their condolences to Amari’s family and encouraged the community to rally behind his loss to prevent other shootings like it, the Sun-Times reported.
Martin, 28, was charged weeks after Amari’s murder when he was found in Wisconsin after prosecutors said he was identified by witnesses and said he made statements against Joiner while in custody.
Joiner, 29, was charged the following spring while in custody in connection with another murder.
That case is also still pending.