8 years for killing the wrong person
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Would he have a longer or shorter sentence had he killed the "right" person?
A man who was arrested two times while on bail for murder and attempted murder in connection with a Rogers Park shooting has reached a plea deal.
Deandre Loveless and another man were trying to shoot the passenger in a car on the 1500 block of West Morse when they instead shot the vehicle’s driver, 42-year-old Carla Martinez, on September 26, 2015, prosecutors said.
Martinez was paralyzed from the neck down, and doctors amputated her legs due to complications from injuries she suffered when she crashed the car after being shot. The intended target, a 19-year-old man, was shot in his ankle.
After Martinez crashed, a third person emerged from her car and shot back at Loveless and the other man, prosecutors said. Prosecutors said he identified Loveless and the other man as the shooters after police arrested him. He eventually received a six-year sentence.
Loveless and the other man were charged with attempted murder in 2016. Prosecutors upgraded the charges to first-degree murder after Martinez died in April 2020 from injuries she suffered in the shooting. A bullet recovered from near her spine matched a gun found that police later found in the co-defendant’s possession, prosecutors alleged.
Around the same time, a judge lowered Loveless’ bail from $1 million to $150,000 due to concerns about the emergence of COVID-19 at Cook County jail, according to court records. He went home on electronic monitoring by posting 10% of the bail.
