April 21, 2020 • 43 mins
Shapearl and Alison sit down with Courtney’s secret girlfriend. Turns out, she knows more than she initially told Shapearl and provides new leads in the case.
A co-production of Topic Studios, The Intercept, the Invisible Institute, and iHeartRadio, in association with Tenderfoot TV.
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Host: Shapearl Wells
Producers: Alison Flowers and Bill Healy
Story Editor: Sarah Geis
Associate Producer: Ellen Glover
Executive Producer, Invisible Institute: Jamie Kalven
Executive Producers, Topic Studios: Maria Zuckerman, Christy Gressman and Leital Molad with Special Thanks to Lizzie Jacobs
Supervising Producer, The Intercept: Roger Hodge
Sound Design: Carl Scott and Bart Warshaw
Mix Engineer: Michael Raphael
Theme Song: “Everybody’s Something,” Chance the Rapper
Additional Reporting: Sam Stecklow, Annie Nguyen, Kahari Blackburn, Rajiv Sinclair, Henri Adams, Matilda Vojak, Dana Brozost-Kelleher, Frances McDonald, Diana Akmakjian, Andrew Fan, Erisa Apantaku and Maddie Anderson.
Translation Support: Benny Hernandez Ocampo and Emma Perez
Fact Checking: Nawal Arjini
Original Music: Eric Butler and Nate Fox of the Social Experiment
Special thanks to Chaclyn Hunt, Maira Khwaja, Andrew Fan, Anwuli Anigbo, Trina Reynolds-Tyler, Sukari Stone, Erisa Apantaku, Craig Futterman, Rick Rowley, Yanilda Gonzalez, Forrest Stuart, Mariah Garcia, Sarah Kinter, Shannon Heffernan, Aaron Moselle, Alan Mills, Vidura Jong-Bahadur, Jason Schumer, Justin Williams and the Jonathan Logan Family Foundation Media Center, Matt Topic, Chris Rasmussen, Bennett Epstein, David Bralow and Julie Wolf.
Theme song “Everybody’s Something” by Chancelor J. Bennett and DJ Ozone with compositions by Roger Karsher, Chuck Magione and James Yancey of Universal Music Publishing Group and Slum Village (R.L. Altman III, Titus Glover/Baatin, J Dilla); recording artist/performance by Chance the Rapper, appearing courtesy of himself and Chance the Rapper LLC.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
What you are about to hear is a work of
investigative journalism that explores one woman's search for answers in
her son's death. The views and opinions in this podcast
do not reflect those of I Heart Media. Previously on Somebody,
the first car that we thought were the police that
was not Courtney's vehicle in the league, and they found
(00:24):
some new evidence that said that it may have happened
the way the police stated. The metaphor of walking back
and assumption feels exactly right. You're really trying to reorient
and reboot really the entire investigation. Every part of me
wants to believe that my son could have survived. Every
(00:47):
part of me. It looks like they are handcuffing a
suspect to bring them in for an arrest. My name
is Chaparral Wells. This is a story of my on Courtney,
a young black man in a fancy car who wound
up with a bullet in his back in front of
a Chicago police station. And it's the story of my
(01:09):
search for the truth. This is somebody, everybody, somebody every day,
No bide, no, no, that's right. This is a video
(01:42):
of Courtney sleeping. Babe still want to go out. It's
taken a few years ago by his girlfriend at the time, Roseo. Babe,
you still want to go out? Churn up. Hmm Yeah.
Roseo and Courtney they were one of those on again,
(02:03):
off again couples, but everyone knew that Rosseo was the
love of his life. She always felt like a daughter
to me and still does. Can you show us your tattoo?
This is it, but it's um actually Courtney's name, and
the date we started officially dating. Um. It's kind of funny.
(02:24):
It was eleven, twelve thirteen. I made him way to
day to ask me out the next day so it
could be eleven. Corney was very caring and for Rosseo,
she received all of that. He'd make up breakfast, he'd
packed her lunch. He even sometimes he watched her niece
for her. He's like, oh, this is a kid I'm
(02:46):
taking to school and babysitting her And I'm like, you're
doing what? Yeah. He just loved kids. Rosie and Courtney
joining World Ventures at the same time. She also got
a BMW as a sales reward. Courtney's was my room
and Rossel's was Champagne. I'm kind of competitive, so as
(03:09):
soon as Corney pulled it out, I was like, I
have to go get mine too. But at World Ventures,
Courtney had a lot of other female co workers. You know,
Courtney really loved women. That's Maryland. She worked with Courtney.
She saw all the drama around him. There was always
an incident with with something like, oh, you know, you're
flaring with this girl or you're talking to this girl.
(03:31):
She can't be playing games and having like all these
different like you know, girls that you're talking to, like
we're here to run a business. When I think about
all these other women that it things that he had
a relationship with, they were to me just filling the gap.
Here I am talking to Alison from the Invisible Institute
(03:52):
about all of this. Don't know why he and r
broke up because he was shams. Oh she found out that.
I knew Courtney had a lot of little girl friends,
but what I didn't know is that his love life
was getting in the way of his job. I found
this recording of Courtney talking about his setbacks at work.
(04:16):
You think about me is that you know, it looks
good on the outside, but sometimes it can be bad
behind closed doors, and you know, and that's that's that's
the obstacles that you're gonna have to go through. You're
gonna have to be able to take a punch in.
Courtney's boss set him down more than once and told
him he needed to stop dating people from World Ventures.
(04:39):
They even removed him from the leadership team. But Courtney
started seeing another co worker anyway, so they had to
keep it a secret. Her name was Alma, and the
night he was killed, Courtney was on his way to
her house. When word got out that Courtney was shot,
(05:08):
all of his friends started calling each other. They were
trying to figure out who Courtney was going to see
at that hour. Eventually they landed on Alma. A lot
of people were very very up that were Courtney's coworker,
Maryland again, because first of all, we had no idea,
(05:29):
like no idea that you know, they were even like
talking or messing around or anything. She lives in a
really rough neighborhood. Maybe an exploit for saw something and
got upset that Cortney was there, Like you know, so
many things ran through our head, and of course the
first thing to do is blame her, because why were
(05:49):
you even there. A few hours after Courtney died, the
police went to see out mom and they drove her
to the hospital. Lots of Courtney's friends were there. Courtney's
friends were grilling Alma for information. She told them that
(06:10):
she didn't hear anything, she didn't see anything, just that
Courtney had text her saying he was outside her house
and then he never showed up. I wonder if they
would have blamed her if that hadn't if they hadn't
been romantically involved. I feel like people do that to women.
(06:32):
You know, you could see the pain on her face
that she felt some sort of guilt, and I told
her at that that very day, you can't feel guilty,
Corney Courtney. Ultimately, Cortney made the choice. He unfortunately made
a choice that was deadly for him. The more I
(06:52):
learned about Almah, the more I understood this wasn't just
the hookup situation. It was starting to get serious is
and he was trying to bond with her kids, and
he was over there at three or four nights a week.
(07:16):
It had been more than a year since my last
meeting with police. In their latest case update in Courtney's
file just stated that they had no updates. I needed
to know who shot my son and clearly the police
weren't going to be any help, so Alison and I
(07:37):
we went on without them. We kept going through Courtney's phone,
trying to understand not only who he was talking to,
but what was going on in his life in the
exact time of his interactions that last night. We got
help from this digital forensic expert, Dr Ashley Podowski, who
volunteered her time to go through Courtney's phone. Hi, Ashley,
(08:02):
how are you. I'm doing good. How are you doing?
I'm doing very well. She has these tools to scrape
every bit of information off the phone and organize it
so we can find any clues that were there. So
I'm actually sending you something right now. I mean, she's
got an email from drop box. She's based in South Dakota,
so we had to send her Cordiney's phone. I was
(08:24):
nervous that the phone could get lost, because you know,
that was all that I had of him, and it
was evidence. So I was just nervous of it leaving
my presence. These are precious things to me. It was
about a week and a half when we received the
phone back. It came back safe and sound, thank god.
(08:44):
Plus it came back with a detail log of all
Cortneys calls texts with time stamps as accurate as they
can get. I calmbed through them with my family. When
did he make the nine one one? Carl at one
sixty three, so from one level, it had to be
(09:06):
about one twelve. Now after this, okay, I'm going We
were looking for signs that Courtney was in trouble, that
something was going on, but we didn't see anything. The
only thing that we found was him goofing off with
his friends and also singing and dancing and making videos.
(09:28):
Then we looked at the day he was killed. I
wanted to see exactly when Courtney and Alma were in touch.
He sent her a text in top of the morning
at am. She rolled back a few hours later, and
then they were texting all afternoon, lots of heart emojis.
He messaged her again about ten PM from a World
(09:50):
Venturous presentation. He was in the city training a new
recruit Casey. Everybody was really happy like um. By the
end of the night, we ended up listening to music
and he was wrapping, which was really cool. I found
the photo of Cordney circled up around a kitchen table
with some friend He's wearing his favorite red hoodie and
(10:13):
everyone is holding Dixie cups. Corney is doing a hand
gesture and basically it's the rock on sign. Corney was
always doing the rock on side and pictures rock on dude.
You know, right about midnight, Courtney text Alma saying I
(10:34):
need to book a massage super sore. Then Alma text
him back, I got you. Corney says when, and she
wrote today. Then just before one in the morning, Corney
headed to her house and Belmont Craigan. On the way there,
(10:56):
Courtney was just being his social butterfly self. He was
on his phone. He was talking to friends and chatting
on Facebook Messenger. He texts Alma, I'm outside. She texts back,
what really, and he was like, yo, okay, I'm going,
she said, meaning that she was headed downstairs to open
(11:18):
the gate. From the phone records and parking tickets that
we found, we know that Courtney and Alma had this
little routine. He drive down her street, cut through the alley,
and parked by the church where he could leave his
car overnight, right by this gold statue of Jesus arms
open wide. Courtney would text Alma saying he arrived, so
(11:43):
she go downstairs and opened the gate for him. They
did this several nights a week, over and over again.
Ali Park Alma, Ali Park Alma. And that night on
March four, Corney sent his last text to Alma at
(12:05):
one eleven in the morning, but he never showed up
at her door. I've been uh living in ministering here
for nineteen years already. This is Father Richard Ballas. He's
a Catholic priest at the church on the corner St.
(12:27):
Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr. Father Ballas lives on the second
floor of the church rectory. I know there was a
shooting movie here right in front of the rectory between
the two streets there. I remember that, and they put
flowers there, and but I don't remember the name. I'm
probably numb to a lot of this. And what about
that police station right there? Do you have any interaction
(12:49):
with the police there ever? Well, yeah, the the policemen
very good to us. We used to have perish carnivals
every year, and of course for security we had the
police at that. The previous pastor stopped it because of
(13:10):
games the gangs in Belmont Craigan. It feels safe during
the day. There's parks and schools, but at night it's
a different story. I had one, two, three, four or
(13:32):
five six eight cameras. This is Jerry Brito. He's a
mechanic who's lived in Bellmont Craigan for twenty five years.
Down the street from the church where Courtney used to
park to go to Alma's. Jerry's put up cameras all
over his property. He says, some years are quiet, some
years are really rough, like when someone moves out and
(13:54):
some of the people move in and they start selling drugs,
or they have people are joining gangs and they bring
the gangs over in Bellmont Craigan. The gangs are mostly Hispanic.
You've got the stylers, the Royals, and the Patucos. Then
there's the Four Corner Hustlers, a black gang. They've all
(14:15):
got their territories. Jerry says the police come to his
house all the time to pull his camera footage because
the city's cameras don't always work. They even got his
videos for Courtney's case. They always respectful and they'd tried
to do the best they can with what they have.
And when the city's cameras don't work, the gang bangers
know it. If they've been shooting. They know that they
(14:37):
can get away with it. To the camera is not working,
that's a problem, if you ask me, He's right. Broken
cameras are a serious problem around Chicago. Citizens pay for
them to help solve crimes, but often they don't work,
like the camera on the corner by Alma's place, the
(14:59):
most critic called camera. Courtney's police file says that camera
didn't capture anything because of a DVR error. Chapralle and
I've gone over this quite a lot. She's still suspicious.
It just tells me, like this whole pod cameras and
all these things, I just don't trust it that camera
(15:20):
would have shown Courtney going down that street and turning
into the alleyway. We've gone out to the neighborhood several
times to track down other cameras to see if police
missed any. Did they get this one? I wonder if
they got the better Yeah, so they have cameras too.
We don't know if they get that. We did find
(15:40):
cameras that were not noted in their reports, but it's
possible they were put up after Courtney's death, so we
didn't have any footage, but we knew there had to
be more information out there. I believe that somebody knows something,
somebody saw something, and it just takes a lot of
courage um from somebody to tell what they saw. All
(16:02):
the police file on Courtney's case was thin. They only
documented interviews with a handful of people, So we decided
to go back and reinterview everyone the detectives talked to.
That meant it was time to talk to Alma, Courtney's
secret girlfriend. Alma and I haven't really been in touch,
(16:27):
but now Allison really wanted to talk to her. So
almost two years after Courtney's death, I text Alma to
see if she would meet with us. As I was
texting her back and forth, Alma mentioned something something that
she never told me before, and I think it's totally
crazy that she will withhold this information. She said she
(16:49):
heard gunshots the night Courtney died. I asked her that
question the day after Courtney was killed, I asked her
did she hear anything? Did she see anything? And this
girl never once told me that she heard gunshots the
night that he died. Hi there your Alma. Hi'm Allison.
(17:19):
Very nice to meet you. Thank you for setting us
side the time. This is Bill in February, I arranged
a meeting. We met up with her on the North
side of Chicago in Uptown, where Alma works at a
cell phone shop. I remember it was freezing outside, so
we used a conference room in a lawyer's office nearby. Yeah, yeah,
(17:43):
I know, you were probably like, oh, I don't want
to go out, and now we're literally right around the corner.
I sat next to Alma, Bill and Allison sat across
the table. All the microphones and the fact that we
were in a law office made it feel sort of
like an interrogation. And Alma, she definitely looked tense. The
(18:04):
way she was sitting. It was like she was protecting herself.
I was just praying that she would finally tell us
everything she knew. I was just ready to put myself
in her train of thought and let her tell her story.
(18:26):
Alma played us some videos of Courtney when we first
sat down. This was like one of those good morning videos,
like he was awake, was everybody else doing? It's him?
And he was always trying to make me laugh because
I was always really serious. That was him all the time.
He'll say the USA or not the US, that let's
get it. Did the people you work with now that
you guys were romantically involved. No, okay, so it was
(18:49):
sort of on the down though, Yes, okay, how did
you feel about that? Um? I was fine with that.
It was it was a little bit complicated, just because
of the way that our team is set up. They've
been keeping their relationship a secret for months, but Courtney
(19:10):
had become close with her three kids. Well, I told
my son that Courtney passed and he asked me what happened,
and I told him that he was shot, and he
just started crying. Did he ask a lot of questions? Um? No.
After that, he just he didn't want to be outside.
(19:32):
He would always tell me we had to hurry up.
Do you sense that the kids are still afraid? For
a long time, they were like coming home from school,
my son would say, we have to starry up because
I don't want to die. We went back to that night.
(19:56):
We asked Alma to walk us through what she remembered.
H He messaged me like around close to one in
the morning, and then uh, he asked me if I
was home, if he could come over. She said she
was in her room listening to music on her headphones
and her roommate Brianna came in to tell her that
she was making a late night run to Walgreens. As
(20:16):
she was telling me that we heard two gunshots and
a car drive off. And was that before or after
you'd gone downstairs to be ready to open the door. No,
that was before we heard the gunshots, like as I
was receiving the text message that he was there. So
the text message came in and we heard the gun
shots at the same time. She went downstairs to open
(20:39):
the gate as usual, but Courtney wasn't there. What did
you think happened at that point in time. I mean,
I was a little bit worried, but it's not It's
not unlike him to change plans quickly. Because I almost
said she heard gunshots right as she got Courtney's text
saying I'm outside. It was one eleven am. But that
(21:02):
just didn't make sense to us because we knew that
four minutes after Courtney text Alma, he was still alive
and well. He was messing around on his phone Facebook,
messaging his friend Brandon, who had just gotten a new job.
Courtney wrote to Brandon, nice, bro, You're gonna kill it man.
Courtney sent that text message to Brandon at one fifteen am.
(21:26):
That was four minutes after he texts Alma and the
Forends that expert confirmed those times. Allison showed Alma the
timeline we put together, so we have if you're hearing
the shots here, obviously he's not gonna be doing He's
not gonna be text you know, saying to Brandon, nice bro,
you're gonna kill it man. So does this at all
(21:51):
like revising your brain what might have happened, or like
when you might have heard the shots? Does this refresh
anything for you? It doesn't make sense. Okay, but you're
you're pretty competent that you heard the shots before you said, okay,
I'm going to go open the door. It was between
(22:13):
here and here. My text messages were back to back.
Did it sound like distance or did it sound really close?
It sounded close. It was two of them pretty like
back to back. It sounded like they were either on
the street or like on the block over, but they
were close. It didn't sound like it was just a
(22:34):
when you heard the shots, as you think, oh that
that could be Courtney or did it not even cross
your mind? It didn't cross my mind because around that time,
like there was just a lot of things going on
in the neighborhood, so we had heard gunshots before, you know,
and it was it wasn't something that was like out
of the ordinary. We kept asking Alma to replay this moment.
(22:58):
Was she really sure about her timing? Almost in her
bedroom with her roommate, there's music on her headphones, and
then they hear gunshots? How many shots too? And did
you all make eye contact or acknowledge that you had
both just heard shots? Or was it just so commonplace
that you wouldn't even have a reaction. Really well, I
had my headphones on, so I took him on off,
(23:20):
and she was like, did you hear that? And I
said yeah, but I wasn't sure. So after that, she
said that she was going to the store, and I
told her that she should wait because we didn't know
what was going on. She went to all grants, did
she see anything not on her way there? Um, when
she was on her way back from the store, she
said that there were police officers with flashlights looking up
(23:41):
and down the street like they were looking for something.
So I couldn't understand why I took almost so long
to speak up about this. I specifically asked her after
corney died more than once. If she had heard any shots,
I was piste off and I know I'll both positive.
I asked, did you hear anything? But I never recalled
(24:03):
you saying anything like that, So I was like, when
you said it, I was like, because we were we
were piecing together at the timeline, we we had to
figure that somebody else would have had to have heard something.
So that's why that question I posed that to you,
And so I was like, okay, because that was like
(24:25):
an important piece of information. Just at the time I
wasn't sure. I felt like I had to be sure.
Even if Alma wasn't sure, she still should have told
me something. And she didn't even tell the detectives when
they came to our house that morning, she said no.
One't even asked her about the shots. Instead, they asked
(24:45):
her about the password to Courtney's phone. To his phone,
I told him he has a kN iPhone, it's his fingerprint.
He didn't never passwords his finger print. By the time
that we got the phone back, the phone's on locks,
so they probably had to take his finger and to
lock his phone. The police got into Courtney's phone just
hours after he died. They put in their report that
(25:06):
Courtney's pass code was his birthday. Now, I know that
couldn't be true because he had way too many girlfriends
to do something like that. When the police talked to Alma,
they wanted to see her phone too, and they just
looked at it and they said it wasn't gonna be
much help, and they just handed me back my phone.
How long did they have her phone far, maybe like
(25:28):
thirty seconds, just opened it and he looked up and down.
And they never asked you if you heard anything, or
they didn't consider your witness. No. After that, they just
gave me their business card and they said that they
were going to call me to speak with me. And
after that I never heard from them. There's just a
few lines and Courtney's foul about the police talking to Alma.
(25:50):
But then there's another report about one of Alma's ex boyfriends.
His name was Kevin, but he also went by Hawk.
They all worked together. Alma and Courtney actually met for
the first time at a birthday party for Hawk. Alma
said Hawk Kevin tried to start a fight with Courtney
(26:11):
that now, Courtney says something to me, like, you know,
we were at a birthday party, people were having drinks.
Um he said something to me him and I laughed
it off. Kevin overheard, and the next thing you know,
there was like an exchange of words, and then Kevin
tried to fight Courtney. I think he was just jealous
of how Courtney was as a person and how other
(26:33):
people reacted to him. I think that was really it.
It wasn't anything else, someone told the police. After Courtney died,
Hawk posted then deleted a message on Facebook saying sorry Courtney,
you can take that different ways. But then three of
Courtney's friends remember another message he posted on Snapchat saying
(26:53):
something like, Lord, forgive me because would he have even
known that Courtney was on rout to your place morning? No,
that day, after I came back from the hospital, he
came to my house and he asked me what Courtney
was doing on his way to my house. So he
was surprised to learn that you two were seeing each other.
I don't think, I mean, no one knows until now.
(27:14):
And again, you didn't feel like he could be involved
in this in some way, No, like no chance or
like probably probably not. Since Courtney died, I've been asking
Alma about her other ex boyfriends. She told me one
was in prison. We looked it up. He was in
(27:36):
for attempted murder. Another X was just getting out of
jail when Courtney was killed. But all the way in
New Jersey. We asked Alma if she had any suspicions
of who killed Courtney. No, not, who might have done it.
I know that um, Like down the street from where
(27:56):
I live, there's a house that UM this guy like
he's you know, he's a game member. He lives there.
We ended up getting into the conversation of what happened
to Courtney, and he told me he's like, it wasn't
anyone from this neighborhood. He's like, I think someone mistook
him for someone else. Wait a goddamn it, Al'm waa
(28:20):
talk to this guy and he knows something about what
happened to my son. And she never told me this either.
Oh my god, I had the whole my tongue. Y'all.
When did you have the conversation with the guy who
lives in that house about what he said happened? Um?
It was I don't remember the exact day. It was
(28:41):
like two days after I got punched in the face,
so like my eye was a little swollen, and I
had like a hoodie on and um when I was
walking down the street, he saw me with my eyes
swollen and he asked me, you know who hit me?
Said no, I got punched the face. Do you mind
(29:01):
telling us what happened? Alma looked over at me. Bill
and Alison looked at me too. I hadn't told them
about this, the punching incident. It happened at my place.
A couple of days after Courtney died. I was at
Chapelle's house. Uh, talking to someone there and what happen?
Punched in the face? What who chappar? Can you enlighten us?
(29:25):
Is Courtney's cousin. This was honestly pretty embarrassing for me
because when I invited Alma to my house, I wanted
her to feel comfortable, but then this crazy cousin of
Courtney's physically attacked Alma. We were just talking. They asked
me what happened that day. I told him exactly what
(29:48):
I remembered, and then in the middle of the conversation,
they said, you killed my cousin and they punched me
in the face. Why did the person accuse you of that?
I don't know. That's just what he said. Everybody was
trying to find out what happened to Courtney, and everybody
(30:11):
was trying to lay blame from where because it just
didn't make sense. My family was like, he shouldn't be
over in that neighborhood. That's that's the Hispanic neighborhood. Why
is he over there? He's with that girl, you know.
That's how they felt. This is why things were strained
between me and Almas since Courtney died. Why will she
(30:32):
cooperate with us after I let her get punched in
the face. But let's get back to Alma's neighbor. The
guy who seemed to know something. Do you know his name?
I don't. I just you know what he looks like. Yeah,
he's uh, shorter than myself. He has really long hair,
(30:52):
like don't pass his waist, and he has a few tattoos. Um,
but he's old. Is walking around the neighborhood. The day
after Courtney was shot, he said that his house was
rated by him by the police. They came in searching
his house. I never seen anything about this guy and
(31:13):
the police file, no raid, no nothing. But I had
a vague recollection of him too. I remember like after
the shooting when we were all in Belmont Craigan passing
out reward flyers. I do remember a man with long
black hair standing on his deck talking on his cell phone.
Just then a bunch of kids came out on bikes
(31:33):
to see what we were doing, as though he sent
them over or something. It felt strange, but there was
so much going on at the time. I just fouled
it away. Thank you so much time. This was like therapy.
(31:55):
Never talked about him right. We said goodbye to Alma
and headed back into the colde. The next day, my
aunt Kim came over. Kim and I were raised like
sisters because we're so close in age. I need to
see the report that the police took on her. I
(32:20):
told her all the details of our interview with Alma.
Reread this stuff being I'm saying, I'm like, oh that, mommy.
I told him about Alma hearing shots after all the
problems with her timeline in this new story about the
guy with the long hair, all the stuff the police
(32:42):
had missed. They barely asked her anything when they talked
to her hours after Courtney died. They didn't speak to
her roommate either. They just never followed up when you
when you getting somebody and you interview right now, you
still actually new same question, just to see if it
lays up. You want to know what you are. Did
you see anybody running? How many shots? None of that
(33:06):
stuff was asked. Police hadn't given me any updates, hadn't
told me what they thought happened to Courtney. But it
turns out Nurse Hawkins from the e R said police
(33:26):
told her that very night Courtney came in what they
thought happened a car jacking, and they they still want
to He tried the car jacking on and he sped away.
They shot into the car. He drove to the police
station and asked for help, saying that he had got shot,
and that's when they called the paramedics. This whole thing
is just get stranger and stranger by the minute. I
(33:48):
have theories in my head. Who knows, but somebody covering
for somebody. So when Alma told us that this long
hair guy down the street said police raided his house
the day after Corney died, we needed to know more.
(34:10):
We looked, but we couldn't find a record of the raid.
But we did find lots of other times police were
sent to this house, including for shots fired. Police found
shell cases and everything. So a few weeks after our
interview with Alma, Allison and Bill took a team to
Belmont Craigan to find this guy. So I'm gonna pull
(34:37):
up to the church and then we can look at
see if there are any skid marks. Yeah, that's very
close to where it's like right behind where Courtney would
have potentially been shot, like you know, on the opposite
side of the church. Five teller suit you. We walked
(34:59):
up to the gate of his house. Sure enough, this
guy was standing on his second floor deck and he
had long hair, just like Alma described. We called to him.
We didn't record because we didn't want to scare him off.
He wouldn't come down, he wouldn't give us his name
or phone number, but he talked to us from the deck.
He said he didn't remember Courtney shooting, but he did
(35:21):
remember that he was asleep that particular night March four,
two years before then. He told us it was a
black guy who got shot. When we asked if he
had any trouble with police in the area, he said
he couldn't talk about that because he works with them
providing janitorial services. He wished us luck. He said we
(35:43):
were doing a good thing for the family. We dug
around and got his arrest records. His rap sheet is long.
Once he was arrested for driving a car in an
armed robbery, but most of the cases against him have
been dropped in court. I hope you goings. Thank you
(36:07):
for making what we were doing. A few weeks later,
Alma put us in touch with her former roommate Brianna,
the one she'd been living with whom Courtney was killed.
I met up with her at a dunkin Donuts. She
remembers the night when Courtney was shot, but says she
was the one who heard the shots, not Alma Um.
So when I heard it, I went up to her
and I had asked her if she had heard anything,
(36:29):
and she let me know that she was in her room.
She had her headphones on so she couldn't hear anything.
So their stories didn't fully line up. But Brianna also
remembered that guy who lived a few doors down. He
had like longer hair, um black hair, and he um
he had a couple of tattoos. Do you know if
you ever tried to talk to Alma just um, they
(36:50):
would pass by through the neighborhood and it was just
a high and by as far as I know, at
the time of the shooting in Brianna was dating Christian Hernandez,
the guy who co signed for Courtney's BMW. So a
few days after I talked to Brianna, Chapel and I
talked to Christian, he came over to Chapel's place with
his new girlfriend and their baby. How old. Oh wow,
(37:13):
congratulations boy girl. Okay, I have a little boy too,
he's nineteen months old. Can't wait, Collete. We settled in
around the dining room table and started talking. Christian said
that right after Courtney died at a candlelight vigil, Almah
told him she had her shots. She told me when
(37:35):
Abriel was outside right here with the candles, And I
asked it, did you tell Chapel? She said he yes,
but she did not tell chaparl And I talked to
five of Courtney's other friends who had been in touch
with Alma in the days following. Almah didn't tell them
(37:55):
about hearing shots either. Then Christian's girlfriend nudged him. She'd
been quiet most of the interview, but it was clear
she wanted him to tell us something. He seemed tentative,
like he didn't want to say I had. It was
about Alma and something she posted to Facebook the same
night I met with Brianna. What are you going to
(38:16):
tell them that the thea she called you that he
went on Facebook and he's seen and he showed it
to me. Alma put an emoji with like the zipper
face and like that. I don't know how what's a
called is doing this? And I told herm like, well
that's weird. Christian's girlfriend made a sign with her hands,
that thing Courtney always did in photos. Alma had posted
(38:39):
two emojis, the rock on emoji and the zipper face.
Then she stopped responding to Chapelle's text messages. Her lips
were zipped coming out. If Alma wasn't we need to
(39:01):
find someone who would so. A couple of weeks later,
we met up with the World Ventures guy named June.
He's a heavy set guy with a fuzzy beard, about
forty years old. He's a DJ. He works at a
tire shop and he also has a cigar company. He's
always talking about it on Facebook. I just want to
know who's ready for Rooftop Evact. It's gonna be exclusively,
(39:24):
gonna have a hand roller. He's gonna host the show.
Tell us what's in the tobacco, what the tobacco was worth,
how to savor it, how to roll it. June knows
a lot of people. I got an ear to the streets.
I talked to everybody, actually everybody with autmost respects. So
people respect me and they'll help me whatever way you can.
June wouldn't say too much about his past with gangs,
(39:44):
but he did say this. In Chicago, if you're not
you're labeled as one, and majority of time you have
no choice. It's by where you live or by who
your family is, and you have no choice but to
be what it is. Jim came with us the first
time we went around the neighborhood a couple of days
after Courtney died. So when I found out what had
(40:05):
happened the first day there was reached out to local gangbangers.
Um none of them took admitts to it, and they
won't lie to me, so if something did happen, they
would tell me the truth. And I found out in
the past maybe about three other murders, and I found
out who it was within a week or two weeks
of it happening, and I've had gang members tell me
all this guy did it, such or such did it
because they know the innocent should have never gone touched.
(40:26):
After asking around, June gotta leave that Courtney's murder might
have been a case of mistaken identity. He said he'd
heard the Four Corner Hustlers was beefing with another gang
in the neighborhood. They had said there was some Hispanic
guys running around in that neighborhood. So they had claimed
as a possibility that maybe they had confused him for
somebody else. So I had to follow that lead as well.
(40:48):
It was falsible, m hmm. Before we left, June told
us a bunch of rumors he heard about Courtney's murder.
He heard that Courtney was killed while buying weed. He
heard the police did it, and that's why the camera
supposedly didn't work by Alma's house. But we needed facts,
and we needed witnesses, and soon we were going to
(41:11):
find them. Every Body. The song by every Day No
by These Noting Somebody is a co production of The
(41:34):
Invisible Institute, The Intercept Topic Studios, and I Heart Radio
in association with Tenderfoot TV. I'm chaparral Wells. This podcast
is produced by Alison Flowers and Bill Heally. Sarah Guice
is our story editor. Ellen Glover is our associate producer
(41:54):
for The Invisible Institute. Jamie Calvin is executive producer for
Topic Studio. Maria Zuckerman, Christie Gressman and Leta Malod are
executive producers. Special thanks to Lizzie Jacobs for the intercept.
Roger Hodge, Deputy Editor, is supervising producer. Sound designed by
Carl Scott and Bart Warshaw. Michael Rayphael is our mixed engineer.
(42:20):
Our theme song, Everybody's Something is by Chance The Rapper.
Original music for the podcast by Nate Fox of The
Social Experiment and Eric Butler. Additional reporting by Sam Steklow,
Annie Winkhari Blackburn, Raji Sinclair, Henry Adams, Matilda Voyat, Dana
Brozo's kellerher Francis McDonald, Diana Archmagian, Maddie Anderson, Andrew Fan
(42:46):
and risa Apantaku. Translations support by Benny Hernandez Occampo and
Emma Perez. Fact checking by Noah are Jenny. Special thanks
to Chris Rasmussen Bennett Epstein, Matt Topic, David Brelow, and
Julie Wolf. We want to hear from you. Email us
(43:06):
at info at somebody podcast dot com, or leave us
a voicemail at seven seven three two seven zero zero
one two one. To learn more about this case and
for links to additional materials, go to our show page
at somebody podcast dot com. You can also find a
(43:27):
list of everyone we want to think there so many
people helped us along the way.
What you are about to hear is a work of
investigative journalism that explores one woman's search for answers in
her son's death. The views and opinions in this podcast
do not reflect those of I Heart Media. Previously on Somebody,
the first car that we thought were the police that
was not Courtney's vehicle in the league, and they found
(00:24):
some new evidence that said that it may have happened
the way the police stated. The metaphor of walking back
and assumption feels exactly right. You're really trying to reorient
and reboot really the entire investigation. Every part of me
wants to believe that my son could have survived. Every
(00:47):
part of me. It looks like they are handcuffing a
suspect to bring them in for an arrest. My name
is Chaparral Wells. This is a story of my on Courtney,
a young black man in a fancy car who wound
up with a bullet in his back in front of
a Chicago police station. And it's the story of my
(01:09):
search for the truth. This is somebody, everybody, somebody every day,
No bide, no, no, that's right. This is a video
(01:42):
of Courtney sleeping. Babe still want to go out. It's
taken a few years ago by his girlfriend at the time, Roseo. Babe,
you still want to go out? Churn up. Hmm Yeah.
Roseo and Courtney they were one of those on again,
(02:03):
off again couples, but everyone knew that Rosseo was the
love of his life. She always felt like a daughter
to me and still does. Can you show us your tattoo?
This is it, but it's um actually Courtney's name, and
the date we started officially dating. Um. It's kind of funny.
(02:24):
It was eleven, twelve thirteen. I made him way to
day to ask me out the next day so it
could be eleven. Corney was very caring and for Rosseo,
she received all of that. He'd make up breakfast, he'd
packed her lunch. He even sometimes he watched her niece
for her. He's like, oh, this is a kid I'm
(02:46):
taking to school and babysitting her And I'm like, you're
doing what? Yeah. He just loved kids. Rosie and Courtney
joining World Ventures at the same time. She also got
a BMW as a sales reward. Courtney's was my room
and Rossel's was Champagne. I'm kind of competitive, so as
(03:09):
soon as Corney pulled it out, I was like, I
have to go get mine too. But at World Ventures,
Courtney had a lot of other female co workers. You know,
Courtney really loved women. That's Maryland. She worked with Courtney.
She saw all the drama around him. There was always
an incident with with something like, oh, you know, you're
flaring with this girl or you're talking to this girl.
(03:31):
She can't be playing games and having like all these
different like you know, girls that you're talking to, like
we're here to run a business. When I think about
all these other women that it things that he had
a relationship with, they were to me just filling the gap.
Here I am talking to Alison from the Invisible Institute
(03:52):
about all of this. Don't know why he and r
broke up because he was shams. Oh she found out that.
I knew Courtney had a lot of little girl friends,
but what I didn't know is that his love life
was getting in the way of his job. I found
this recording of Courtney talking about his setbacks at work.
(04:16):
You think about me is that you know, it looks
good on the outside, but sometimes it can be bad
behind closed doors, and you know, and that's that's that's
the obstacles that you're gonna have to go through. You're
gonna have to be able to take a punch in.
Courtney's boss set him down more than once and told
him he needed to stop dating people from World Ventures.
(04:39):
They even removed him from the leadership team. But Courtney
started seeing another co worker anyway, so they had to
keep it a secret. Her name was Alma, and the
night he was killed, Courtney was on his way to
her house. When word got out that Courtney was shot,
(05:08):
all of his friends started calling each other. They were
trying to figure out who Courtney was going to see
at that hour. Eventually they landed on Alma. A lot
of people were very very up that were Courtney's coworker,
Maryland again, because first of all, we had no idea,
(05:29):
like no idea that you know, they were even like
talking or messing around or anything. She lives in a
really rough neighborhood. Maybe an exploit for saw something and
got upset that Cortney was there, Like you know, so
many things ran through our head, and of course the
first thing to do is blame her, because why were
(05:49):
you even there. A few hours after Courtney died, the
police went to see out mom and they drove her
to the hospital. Lots of Courtney's friends were there. Courtney's
friends were grilling Alma for information. She told them that
(06:10):
she didn't hear anything, she didn't see anything, just that
Courtney had text her saying he was outside her house
and then he never showed up. I wonder if they
would have blamed her if that hadn't if they hadn't
been romantically involved. I feel like people do that to women.
(06:32):
You know, you could see the pain on her face
that she felt some sort of guilt, and I told
her at that that very day, you can't feel guilty,
Corney Courtney. Ultimately, Cortney made the choice. He unfortunately made
a choice that was deadly for him. The more I
(06:52):
learned about Almah, the more I understood this wasn't just
the hookup situation. It was starting to get serious is
and he was trying to bond with her kids, and
he was over there at three or four nights a week.
(07:16):
It had been more than a year since my last
meeting with police. In their latest case update in Courtney's
file just stated that they had no updates. I needed
to know who shot my son and clearly the police
weren't going to be any help, so Alison and I
(07:37):
we went on without them. We kept going through Courtney's phone,
trying to understand not only who he was talking to,
but what was going on in his life in the
exact time of his interactions that last night. We got
help from this digital forensic expert, Dr Ashley Podowski, who
volunteered her time to go through Courtney's phone. Hi, Ashley,
(08:02):
how are you. I'm doing good. How are you doing?
I'm doing very well. She has these tools to scrape
every bit of information off the phone and organize it
so we can find any clues that were there. So
I'm actually sending you something right now. I mean, she's
got an email from drop box. She's based in South Dakota,
so we had to send her Cordiney's phone. I was
(08:24):
nervous that the phone could get lost, because you know,
that was all that I had of him, and it
was evidence. So I was just nervous of it leaving
my presence. These are precious things to me. It was
about a week and a half when we received the
phone back. It came back safe and sound, thank god.
(08:44):
Plus it came back with a detail log of all
Cortneys calls texts with time stamps as accurate as they
can get. I calmbed through them with my family. When
did he make the nine one one? Carl at one
sixty three, so from one level, it had to be
(09:06):
about one twelve. Now after this, okay, I'm going We
were looking for signs that Courtney was in trouble, that
something was going on, but we didn't see anything. The
only thing that we found was him goofing off with
his friends and also singing and dancing and making videos.
(09:28):
Then we looked at the day he was killed. I
wanted to see exactly when Courtney and Alma were in touch.
He sent her a text in top of the morning
at am. She rolled back a few hours later, and
then they were texting all afternoon, lots of heart emojis.
He messaged her again about ten PM from a World
(09:50):
Venturous presentation. He was in the city training a new
recruit Casey. Everybody was really happy like um. By the
end of the night, we ended up listening to music
and he was wrapping, which was really cool. I found
the photo of Cordney circled up around a kitchen table
with some friend He's wearing his favorite red hoodie and
(10:13):
everyone is holding Dixie cups. Corney is doing a hand
gesture and basically it's the rock on sign. Corney was
always doing the rock on side and pictures rock on dude.
You know, right about midnight, Courtney text Alma saying I
(10:34):
need to book a massage super sore. Then Alma text
him back, I got you. Corney says when, and she
wrote today. Then just before one in the morning, Corney
headed to her house and Belmont Craigan. On the way there,
(10:56):
Courtney was just being his social butterfly self. He was
on his phone. He was talking to friends and chatting
on Facebook Messenger. He texts Alma, I'm outside. She texts back,
what really, and he was like, yo, okay, I'm going,
she said, meaning that she was headed downstairs to open
(11:18):
the gate. From the phone records and parking tickets that
we found, we know that Courtney and Alma had this
little routine. He drive down her street, cut through the alley,
and parked by the church where he could leave his
car overnight, right by this gold statue of Jesus arms
open wide. Courtney would text Alma saying he arrived, so
(11:43):
she go downstairs and opened the gate for him. They
did this several nights a week, over and over again.
Ali Park Alma, Ali Park Alma. And that night on
March four, Corney sent his last text to Alma at
(12:05):
one eleven in the morning, but he never showed up
at her door. I've been uh living in ministering here
for nineteen years already. This is Father Richard Ballas. He's
a Catholic priest at the church on the corner St.
(12:27):
Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr. Father Ballas lives on the second
floor of the church rectory. I know there was a
shooting movie here right in front of the rectory between
the two streets there. I remember that, and they put
flowers there, and but I don't remember the name. I'm
probably numb to a lot of this. And what about
that police station right there? Do you have any interaction
(12:49):
with the police there ever? Well, yeah, the the policemen
very good to us. We used to have perish carnivals
every year, and of course for security we had the
police at that. The previous pastor stopped it because of
(13:10):
games the gangs in Belmont Craigan. It feels safe during
the day. There's parks and schools, but at night it's
a different story. I had one, two, three, four or
(13:32):
five six eight cameras. This is Jerry Brito. He's a
mechanic who's lived in Bellmont Craigan for twenty five years.
Down the street from the church where Courtney used to
park to go to Alma's. Jerry's put up cameras all
over his property. He says, some years are quiet, some
years are really rough, like when someone moves out and
(13:54):
some of the people move in and they start selling drugs,
or they have people are joining gangs and they bring
the gangs over in Bellmont Craigan. The gangs are mostly Hispanic.
You've got the stylers, the Royals, and the Patucos. Then
there's the Four Corner Hustlers, a black gang. They've all
(14:15):
got their territories. Jerry says the police come to his
house all the time to pull his camera footage because
the city's cameras don't always work. They even got his
videos for Courtney's case. They always respectful and they'd tried
to do the best they can with what they have.
And when the city's cameras don't work, the gang bangers
know it. If they've been shooting. They know that they
(14:37):
can get away with it. To the camera is not working,
that's a problem, if you ask me, He's right. Broken
cameras are a serious problem around Chicago. Citizens pay for
them to help solve crimes, but often they don't work,
like the camera on the corner by Alma's place, the
(14:59):
most critic called camera. Courtney's police file says that camera
didn't capture anything because of a DVR error. Chapralle and
I've gone over this quite a lot. She's still suspicious.
It just tells me, like this whole pod cameras and
all these things, I just don't trust it that camera
(15:20):
would have shown Courtney going down that street and turning
into the alleyway. We've gone out to the neighborhood several
times to track down other cameras to see if police
missed any. Did they get this one? I wonder if
they got the better Yeah, so they have cameras too.
We don't know if they get that. We did find
(15:40):
cameras that were not noted in their reports, but it's
possible they were put up after Courtney's death, so we
didn't have any footage, but we knew there had to
be more information out there. I believe that somebody knows something,
somebody saw something, and it just takes a lot of
courage um from somebody to tell what they saw. All
(16:02):
the police file on Courtney's case was thin. They only
documented interviews with a handful of people, So we decided
to go back and reinterview everyone the detectives talked to.
That meant it was time to talk to Alma, Courtney's
secret girlfriend. Alma and I haven't really been in touch,
(16:27):
but now Allison really wanted to talk to her. So
almost two years after Courtney's death, I text Alma to
see if she would meet with us. As I was
texting her back and forth, Alma mentioned something something that
she never told me before, and I think it's totally
crazy that she will withhold this information. She said she
(16:49):
heard gunshots the night Courtney died. I asked her that
question the day after Courtney was killed, I asked her
did she hear anything? Did she see anything? And this
girl never once told me that she heard gunshots the
night that he died. Hi there your Alma. Hi'm Allison.
(17:19):
Very nice to meet you. Thank you for setting us
side the time. This is Bill in February, I arranged
a meeting. We met up with her on the North
side of Chicago in Uptown, where Alma works at a
cell phone shop. I remember it was freezing outside, so
we used a conference room in a lawyer's office nearby. Yeah, yeah,
(17:43):
I know, you were probably like, oh, I don't want
to go out, and now we're literally right around the corner.
I sat next to Alma, Bill and Allison sat across
the table. All the microphones and the fact that we
were in a law office made it feel sort of
like an interrogation. And Alma, she definitely looked tense. The
(18:04):
way she was sitting. It was like she was protecting herself.
I was just praying that she would finally tell us
everything she knew. I was just ready to put myself
in her train of thought and let her tell her story.
(18:26):
Alma played us some videos of Courtney when we first
sat down. This was like one of those good morning videos,
like he was awake, was everybody else doing? It's him?
And he was always trying to make me laugh because
I was always really serious. That was him all the time.
He'll say the USA or not the US, that let's
get it. Did the people you work with now that
you guys were romantically involved. No, okay, so it was
(18:49):
sort of on the down though, Yes, okay, how did
you feel about that? Um? I was fine with that.
It was it was a little bit complicated, just because
of the way that our team is set up. They've
been keeping their relationship a secret for months, but Courtney
(19:10):
had become close with her three kids. Well, I told
my son that Courtney passed and he asked me what happened,
and I told him that he was shot, and he
just started crying. Did he ask a lot of questions? Um? No.
After that, he just he didn't want to be outside.
(19:32):
He would always tell me we had to hurry up.
Do you sense that the kids are still afraid? For
a long time, they were like coming home from school,
my son would say, we have to starry up because
I don't want to die. We went back to that night.
(19:56):
We asked Alma to walk us through what she remembered.
H He messaged me like around close to one in
the morning, and then uh, he asked me if I
was home, if he could come over. She said she
was in her room listening to music on her headphones
and her roommate Brianna came in to tell her that
she was making a late night run to Walgreens. As
(20:16):
she was telling me that we heard two gunshots and
a car drive off. And was that before or after
you'd gone downstairs to be ready to open the door. No,
that was before we heard the gunshots, like as I
was receiving the text message that he was there. So
the text message came in and we heard the gun
shots at the same time. She went downstairs to open
(20:39):
the gate as usual, but Courtney wasn't there. What did
you think happened at that point in time. I mean,
I was a little bit worried, but it's not It's
not unlike him to change plans quickly. Because I almost
said she heard gunshots right as she got Courtney's text
saying I'm outside. It was one eleven am. But that
(21:02):
just didn't make sense to us because we knew that
four minutes after Courtney text Alma, he was still alive
and well. He was messing around on his phone Facebook,
messaging his friend Brandon, who had just gotten a new job.
Courtney wrote to Brandon, nice, bro, You're gonna kill it man.
Courtney sent that text message to Brandon at one fifteen am.
(21:26):
That was four minutes after he texts Alma and the
Forends that expert confirmed those times. Allison showed Alma the
timeline we put together, so we have if you're hearing
the shots here, obviously he's not gonna be doing He's
not gonna be text you know, saying to Brandon, nice bro,
you're gonna kill it man. So does this at all
(21:51):
like revising your brain what might have happened, or like
when you might have heard the shots? Does this refresh
anything for you? It doesn't make sense. Okay, but you're
you're pretty competent that you heard the shots before you said, okay,
I'm going to go open the door. It was between
(22:13):
here and here. My text messages were back to back.
Did it sound like distance or did it sound really close?
It sounded close. It was two of them pretty like
back to back. It sounded like they were either on
the street or like on the block over, but they
were close. It didn't sound like it was just a
(22:34):
when you heard the shots, as you think, oh that
that could be Courtney or did it not even cross
your mind? It didn't cross my mind because around that time,
like there was just a lot of things going on
in the neighborhood, so we had heard gunshots before, you know,
and it was it wasn't something that was like out
of the ordinary. We kept asking Alma to replay this moment.
(22:58):
Was she really sure about her timing? Almost in her
bedroom with her roommate, there's music on her headphones, and
then they hear gunshots? How many shots too? And did
you all make eye contact or acknowledge that you had
both just heard shots? Or was it just so commonplace
that you wouldn't even have a reaction. Really well, I
had my headphones on, so I took him on off,
(23:20):
and she was like, did you hear that? And I
said yeah, but I wasn't sure. So after that, she
said that she was going to the store, and I
told her that she should wait because we didn't know
what was going on. She went to all grants, did
she see anything not on her way there? Um, when
she was on her way back from the store, she
said that there were police officers with flashlights looking up
(23:41):
and down the street like they were looking for something.
So I couldn't understand why I took almost so long
to speak up about this. I specifically asked her after
corney died more than once. If she had heard any shots,
I was piste off and I know I'll both positive.
I asked, did you hear anything? But I never recalled
(24:03):
you saying anything like that, So I was like, when
you said it, I was like, because we were we
were piecing together at the timeline, we we had to
figure that somebody else would have had to have heard something.
So that's why that question I posed that to you,
And so I was like, okay, because that was like
(24:25):
an important piece of information. Just at the time I
wasn't sure. I felt like I had to be sure.
Even if Alma wasn't sure, she still should have told
me something. And she didn't even tell the detectives when
they came to our house that morning, she said no.
One't even asked her about the shots. Instead, they asked
(24:45):
her about the password to Courtney's phone. To his phone,
I told him he has a kN iPhone, it's his fingerprint.
He didn't never passwords his finger print. By the time
that we got the phone back, the phone's on locks,
so they probably had to take his finger and to
lock his phone. The police got into Courtney's phone just
hours after he died. They put in their report that
(25:06):
Courtney's pass code was his birthday. Now, I know that
couldn't be true because he had way too many girlfriends
to do something like that. When the police talked to Alma,
they wanted to see her phone too, and they just
looked at it and they said it wasn't gonna be
much help, and they just handed me back my phone.
How long did they have her phone far, maybe like
(25:28):
thirty seconds, just opened it and he looked up and down.
And they never asked you if you heard anything, or
they didn't consider your witness. No. After that, they just
gave me their business card and they said that they
were going to call me to speak with me. And
after that I never heard from them. There's just a
few lines and Courtney's foul about the police talking to Alma.
(25:50):
But then there's another report about one of Alma's ex boyfriends.
His name was Kevin, but he also went by Hawk.
They all worked together. Alma and Courtney actually met for
the first time at a birthday party for Hawk. Alma
said Hawk Kevin tried to start a fight with Courtney
(26:11):
that now, Courtney says something to me, like, you know,
we were at a birthday party, people were having drinks.
Um he said something to me him and I laughed
it off. Kevin overheard, and the next thing you know,
there was like an exchange of words, and then Kevin
tried to fight Courtney. I think he was just jealous
of how Courtney was as a person and how other
(26:33):
people reacted to him. I think that was really it.
It wasn't anything else, someone told the police. After Courtney died,
Hawk posted then deleted a message on Facebook saying sorry Courtney,
you can take that different ways. But then three of
Courtney's friends remember another message he posted on Snapchat saying
(26:53):
something like, Lord, forgive me because would he have even
known that Courtney was on rout to your place morning? No,
that day, after I came back from the hospital, he
came to my house and he asked me what Courtney
was doing on his way to my house. So he
was surprised to learn that you two were seeing each other.
I don't think, I mean, no one knows until now.
(27:14):
And again, you didn't feel like he could be involved
in this in some way, No, like no chance or
like probably probably not. Since Courtney died, I've been asking
Alma about her other ex boyfriends. She told me one
was in prison. We looked it up. He was in
(27:36):
for attempted murder. Another X was just getting out of
jail when Courtney was killed. But all the way in
New Jersey. We asked Alma if she had any suspicions
of who killed Courtney. No, not, who might have done it.
I know that um, Like down the street from where
(27:56):
I live, there's a house that UM this guy like
he's you know, he's a game member. He lives there.
We ended up getting into the conversation of what happened
to Courtney, and he told me he's like, it wasn't
anyone from this neighborhood. He's like, I think someone mistook
him for someone else. Wait a goddamn it, Al'm waa
(28:20):
talk to this guy and he knows something about what
happened to my son. And she never told me this either.
Oh my god, I had the whole my tongue. Y'all.
When did you have the conversation with the guy who
lives in that house about what he said happened? Um?
It was I don't remember the exact day. It was
(28:41):
like two days after I got punched in the face,
so like my eye was a little swollen, and I
had like a hoodie on and um when I was
walking down the street, he saw me with my eyes
swollen and he asked me, you know who hit me?
Said no, I got punched the face. Do you mind
(29:01):
telling us what happened? Alma looked over at me. Bill
and Alison looked at me too. I hadn't told them
about this, the punching incident. It happened at my place.
A couple of days after Courtney died. I was at
Chapelle's house. Uh, talking to someone there and what happen?
Punched in the face? What who chappar? Can you enlighten us?
(29:25):
Is Courtney's cousin. This was honestly pretty embarrassing for me
because when I invited Alma to my house, I wanted
her to feel comfortable, but then this crazy cousin of
Courtney's physically attacked Alma. We were just talking. They asked
me what happened that day. I told him exactly what
(29:48):
I remembered, and then in the middle of the conversation,
they said, you killed my cousin and they punched me
in the face. Why did the person accuse you of that?
I don't know. That's just what he said. Everybody was
trying to find out what happened to Courtney, and everybody
(30:11):
was trying to lay blame from where because it just
didn't make sense. My family was like, he shouldn't be
over in that neighborhood. That's that's the Hispanic neighborhood. Why
is he over there? He's with that girl, you know.
That's how they felt. This is why things were strained
between me and Almas since Courtney died. Why will she
(30:32):
cooperate with us after I let her get punched in
the face. But let's get back to Alma's neighbor. The
guy who seemed to know something. Do you know his name?
I don't. I just you know what he looks like. Yeah,
he's uh, shorter than myself. He has really long hair,
(30:52):
like don't pass his waist, and he has a few tattoos. Um,
but he's old. Is walking around the neighborhood. The day
after Courtney was shot, he said that his house was
rated by him by the police. They came in searching
his house. I never seen anything about this guy and
(31:13):
the police file, no raid, no nothing. But I had
a vague recollection of him too. I remember like after
the shooting when we were all in Belmont Craigan passing
out reward flyers. I do remember a man with long
black hair standing on his deck talking on his cell phone.
Just then a bunch of kids came out on bikes
(31:33):
to see what we were doing, as though he sent
them over or something. It felt strange, but there was
so much going on at the time. I just fouled
it away. Thank you so much time. This was like therapy.
(31:55):
Never talked about him right. We said goodbye to Alma
and headed back into the colde. The next day, my
aunt Kim came over. Kim and I were raised like
sisters because we're so close in age. I need to
see the report that the police took on her. I
(32:20):
told her all the details of our interview with Alma.
Reread this stuff being I'm saying, I'm like, oh that, mommy.
I told him about Alma hearing shots after all the
problems with her timeline in this new story about the
guy with the long hair, all the stuff the police
(32:42):
had missed. They barely asked her anything when they talked
to her hours after Courtney died. They didn't speak to
her roommate either. They just never followed up when you
when you getting somebody and you interview right now, you
still actually new same question, just to see if it
lays up. You want to know what you are. Did
you see anybody running? How many shots? None of that
(33:06):
stuff was asked. Police hadn't given me any updates, hadn't
told me what they thought happened to Courtney. But it
turns out Nurse Hawkins from the e R said police
(33:26):
told her that very night Courtney came in what they
thought happened a car jacking, and they they still want
to He tried the car jacking on and he sped away.
They shot into the car. He drove to the police
station and asked for help, saying that he had got shot,
and that's when they called the paramedics. This whole thing
is just get stranger and stranger by the minute. I
(33:48):
have theories in my head. Who knows, but somebody covering
for somebody. So when Alma told us that this long
hair guy down the street said police raided his house
the day after Corney died, we needed to know more.
(34:10):
We looked, but we couldn't find a record of the raid.
But we did find lots of other times police were
sent to this house, including for shots fired. Police found
shell cases and everything. So a few weeks after our
interview with Alma, Allison and Bill took a team to
Belmont Craigan to find this guy. So I'm gonna pull
(34:37):
up to the church and then we can look at
see if there are any skid marks. Yeah, that's very
close to where it's like right behind where Courtney would
have potentially been shot, like you know, on the opposite
side of the church. Five teller suit you. We walked
(34:59):
up to the gate of his house. Sure enough, this
guy was standing on his second floor deck and he
had long hair, just like Alma described. We called to him.
We didn't record because we didn't want to scare him off.
He wouldn't come down, he wouldn't give us his name
or phone number, but he talked to us from the deck.
He said he didn't remember Courtney shooting, but he did
(35:21):
remember that he was asleep that particular night March four,
two years before then. He told us it was a
black guy who got shot. When we asked if he
had any trouble with police in the area, he said
he couldn't talk about that because he works with them
providing janitorial services. He wished us luck. He said we
(35:43):
were doing a good thing for the family. We dug
around and got his arrest records. His rap sheet is long.
Once he was arrested for driving a car in an
armed robbery, but most of the cases against him have
been dropped in court. I hope you goings. Thank you
(36:07):
for making what we were doing. A few weeks later,
Alma put us in touch with her former roommate Brianna,
the one she'd been living with whom Courtney was killed.
I met up with her at a dunkin Donuts. She
remembers the night when Courtney was shot, but says she
was the one who heard the shots, not Alma Um.
So when I heard it, I went up to her
and I had asked her if she had heard anything,
(36:29):
and she let me know that she was in her room.
She had her headphones on so she couldn't hear anything.
So their stories didn't fully line up. But Brianna also
remembered that guy who lived a few doors down. He
had like longer hair, um black hair, and he um
he had a couple of tattoos. Do you know if
you ever tried to talk to Alma just um, they
(36:50):
would pass by through the neighborhood and it was just
a high and by as far as I know, at
the time of the shooting in Brianna was dating Christian Hernandez,
the guy who co signed for Courtney's BMW. So a
few days after I talked to Brianna, Chapel and I
talked to Christian, he came over to Chapel's place with
his new girlfriend and their baby. How old. Oh wow,
(37:13):
congratulations boy girl. Okay, I have a little boy too,
he's nineteen months old. Can't wait, Collete. We settled in
around the dining room table and started talking. Christian said
that right after Courtney died at a candlelight vigil, Almah
told him she had her shots. She told me when
(37:35):
Abriel was outside right here with the candles, And I
asked it, did you tell Chapel? She said he yes,
but she did not tell chaparl And I talked to
five of Courtney's other friends who had been in touch
with Alma in the days following. Almah didn't tell them
(37:55):
about hearing shots either. Then Christian's girlfriend nudged him. She'd
been quiet most of the interview, but it was clear
she wanted him to tell us something. He seemed tentative,
like he didn't want to say I had. It was
about Alma and something she posted to Facebook the same
night I met with Brianna. What are you going to
(38:16):
tell them that the thea she called you that he
went on Facebook and he's seen and he showed it
to me. Alma put an emoji with like the zipper
face and like that. I don't know how what's a
called is doing this? And I told herm like, well
that's weird. Christian's girlfriend made a sign with her hands,
that thing Courtney always did in photos. Alma had posted
(38:39):
two emojis, the rock on emoji and the zipper face.
Then she stopped responding to Chapelle's text messages. Her lips
were zipped coming out. If Alma wasn't we need to
(39:01):
find someone who would so. A couple of weeks later,
we met up with the World Ventures guy named June.
He's a heavy set guy with a fuzzy beard, about
forty years old. He's a DJ. He works at a
tire shop and he also has a cigar company. He's
always talking about it on Facebook. I just want to
know who's ready for Rooftop Evact. It's gonna be exclusively,
(39:24):
gonna have a hand roller. He's gonna host the show.
Tell us what's in the tobacco, what the tobacco was worth,
how to savor it, how to roll it. June knows
a lot of people. I got an ear to the streets.
I talked to everybody, actually everybody with autmost respects. So
people respect me and they'll help me whatever way you can.
June wouldn't say too much about his past with gangs,
(39:44):
but he did say this. In Chicago, if you're not
you're labeled as one, and majority of time you have
no choice. It's by where you live or by who
your family is, and you have no choice but to
be what it is. Jim came with us the first
time we went around the neighborhood a couple of days
after Courtney died. So when I found out what had
(40:05):
happened the first day there was reached out to local gangbangers.
Um none of them took admitts to it, and they
won't lie to me, so if something did happen, they
would tell me the truth. And I found out in
the past maybe about three other murders, and I found
out who it was within a week or two weeks
of it happening, and I've had gang members tell me
all this guy did it, such or such did it
because they know the innocent should have never gone touched.
(40:26):
After asking around, June gotta leave that Courtney's murder might
have been a case of mistaken identity. He said he'd
heard the Four Corner Hustlers was beefing with another gang
in the neighborhood. They had said there was some Hispanic
guys running around in that neighborhood. So they had claimed
as a possibility that maybe they had confused him for
somebody else. So I had to follow that lead as well.
(40:48):
It was falsible, m hmm. Before we left, June told
us a bunch of rumors he heard about Courtney's murder.
He heard that Courtney was killed while buying weed. He
heard the police did it, and that's why the camera
supposedly didn't work by Alma's house. But we needed facts,
and we needed witnesses, and soon we were going to
(41:11):
find them. Every Body. The song by every Day No
by These Noting Somebody is a co production of The
(41:34):
Invisible Institute, The Intercept Topic Studios, and I Heart Radio
in association with Tenderfoot TV. I'm chaparral Wells. This podcast
is produced by Alison Flowers and Bill Heally. Sarah Guice
is our story editor. Ellen Glover is our associate producer
(41:54):
for The Invisible Institute. Jamie Calvin is executive producer for
Topic Studio. Maria Zuckerman, Christie Gressman and Leta Malod are
executive producers. Special thanks to Lizzie Jacobs for the intercept.
Roger Hodge, Deputy Editor, is supervising producer. Sound designed by
Carl Scott and Bart Warshaw. Michael Rayphael is our mixed engineer.
(42:20):
Our theme song, Everybody's Something is by Chance The Rapper.
Original music for the podcast by Nate Fox of The
Social Experiment and Eric Butler. Additional reporting by Sam Steklow,
Annie Winkhari Blackburn, Raji Sinclair, Henry Adams, Matilda Voyat, Dana
Brozo's kellerher Francis McDonald, Diana Archmagian, Maddie Anderson, Andrew Fan
(42:46):
and risa Apantaku. Translations support by Benny Hernandez Occampo and
Emma Perez. Fact checking by Noah are Jenny. Special thanks
to Chris Rasmussen Bennett Epstein, Matt Topic, David Brelow, and
Julie Wolf. We want to hear from you. Email us
(43:06):
at info at somebody podcast dot com, or leave us
a voicemail at seven seven three two seven zero zero
one two one. To learn more about this case and
for links to additional materials, go to our show page
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(43:27):
list of everyone we want to think there so many
people helped us along the way.
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