Dude should’ve stayed in jail! And the Tribune needs better editors.
None of my friends have $10,000 sitting around, and if they did, they wouldn’t spend it on my bail.
I wonder if the guy’s friend will get the $10,000 back.
Ah, Chicago! The Disneyland of Crime!
This probably wasn’t a coincidence. Somebody evened the score.
I wonder if this is gang related? They certainly are capable of retaliation.
Of course it was gang related. No I don’t have proof but when you live in Chicago for over 50 years, you know this stuff.
If you subtract the gang-related crime from Chicago’s crime statistics, it becomes just about the safest place on earth!
One wonders if his killers arranged the bond…?
From the linked article:
Weird. So, Belmont’s family scraped together the $10,000, a friend delivered it, and Belmont was shot within a few blocks of the jail. It sure sounds like the killers were waiting for him. They shot him, raced off in an SUV, crashed the SUV, and took off on foot. If the attorney doesn’t think it was gang-related, and doesn’t think word of Belmont’s release would have spread that quickly, what’s left? Two guys sitting around idly in their SUV decide to kill a random dude who just got out of jail? The family or friend set him up? Mistaken identity? And if the attorney didn’t think Belmont would be targeted for retaliation since the robbery wasn’t gang-related, why did he tell him to leave the neighborhood?
The killers were waiting to steal the bus fare, cheap suit, and cardboard suitcase.
I should explain.
There is an iconic and classic scene in Jackie Brown where Samuel L Jackson convinces Chris Tucker to hide in the ‘dirty assed trunk’ of his car with an empty shotgun, supposedly to scare some people who owe him money in ‘Korea-Town’.
SLJ Guilts CT to play along, as he has just paid a $10k Bond to get him out of jail. Once CT gets into the trunk, SLJ drives to an empty lot near by, while playing Strawberry Letter 23 as loudly as he can.
Once in the field, SLJ opens the trunk, double-taps the surprised CT… and makes plans to get his bail money back from the Bondsman because CT is dead.
As a scene, its incredibly cold and pretty unforgettable.
I know that 3-4 clips of this exist on Youtube, but there is so much cursing and so much use of the N-word over and over again that I just don’t feel comfortable posting even a broken link to it here… even if it was double spoiler boxed.
I only said “Strawberry Letter 23” in the post above because if you ever do see that scene, that song will always mean someone is about to get capped and in a very cold way.
Yeah, I read that statement with a similar amount of incredulity. I’d like to hear what the attorney’s theory is. I’m assuming the attorney must have reasons not to speculate in the affirmative that it was a revenge killing, though I don’t know what those reasons would be at the moment, when a simple “no comment” or “we don’t have enough information at this time” would do and seem to be the more typical response.
WTF.
Well, it’s possible it wasn’t specifically gang-related, but still a revenge killing/street justice. (I don’t for a moment believe that the shooters are unconnected to the now-dead alleged murderer.)
I don’t know that that lawyer’s thinking. Just because his client’s crime wasn’t gang related, that doesn’t mean that there’s not a friend or relative of the victim out there who’s royally pissed that he would never be tried for murder.
I remember an episode of the old show Hill Street Blues, in which two guys were being held for raping and murdering a nun. I guess most of the evidence was circumstancial, although the cops were positive these guys had done it. They needed a confession so they told the guys they were going to turn them loose. That would be out the front door of the station, where a very large and angry crowd had gathered. They would certainly have been killed, so the dudes fessed up.
I think Yllaria has it right.
Ah. Good - I was going bald from the head-scratching.
That was one of my favorite episodes.
There’s also a possibility the intended target was the guy behind the wheel. That happens a LOT around here.
Yeah, sorry. I watch a lot of movies & have a pretty decent memory of them.
You may have never even seen ‘Jackie Brown’, so don’t feel too badly.
I can’t be relieved that gang shooters are such piss-poor shots. Its scary enough that so many have guns.
No matter who they were after, think of the sheer number of armed car teams that had to be out on the road that night… circling to try to find and to track Mr. Belmont’s car.
Think of the telecom (and GPS?) coordination behind it. He’s just out of lock-up, so you know there were no tracking devices on him or in his things, so there had to be some in the hit team’s cars.
Then, its a phone call or a text to a central location where someone takes the address where the car was spotted, “sees” the GPS of the hit teams they have on the roads, and guides the hit teams turn by turn to the area and in the direction
Mr Belmont was travelling to set up the hit.
It must be like an UBER for murder.
Private tracking software like that can’t be too rare; trucking companies have been using them for a decade.