A man believed to have shot and killed eight people at three different locations in a suburban area of Chicago was tracked to Texas on Monday, where he allegedly committed suicide.
The U.S. Marshals caught up to Romeo Nance, 23, at a gas station on Interstate 35 near Natalia, not far from San Antonio, on January 22 at about 8:30 p.m. After being confronted, the mass murder suspect allegedly fatally shot himself with a handgun. This occurred roughly 1,200 miles away from the location of several fatal shootings that occurred about 24 hours earlier.
Nance was identified as the main suspect in a series of fatal shootings near Chicago. One victim — said to have been 28-year-old Toyosi I. Bakare, who was originally from Nigeria — was shot and killed outside an apartment complex in Illinois’ Will County.
Five more victims were found shot to death in a residence in the 2200 block of West Acres Road in Joliet. These victims included a 38-year-old man, a 38-year-old woman, a 20-year-old woman, a 16-year-old girl, and a 14-year-old girl.
Two more dead bodies — those of a 47-year-old woman and a 35-year-old man — were discovered in a home just across the road. These victims’ identities and the details surrounding their manner and times of death have not yet been released.
Another male victim, age 42, was also allegedly shot by Nance in the 200 block of Davis Street and sustained non-life-threatening injuries. The incident was captured by a nearby surveillance camera.
The motive behind these attacks is still under investigation, yet Nance was reportedly related to many of the victims, though others might have been randomly targeted.
“I’ve been a policeman 29 years and this is probably the worst crime scene I’ve ever been associated with,” Joliet Police Chief William Evans said during a news conference, according to WFAA.
The shootings also sparked considerable distraught among local residents. For instance, Teresa Smart, who lives a block from the two homes on West Acres Road, remarked that it was all “way too close to home.”
“I keep looking out the window and double-checking my doors,” Smart said, according to WFAA. “It’s super scary.”
Dallas, another high-crime jurisdiction like Joliet’s big-city neighbor Chicago, has seen 11 murders as of January 22, according to the City’s crime analytics dashboard. This bloody start to the new year suggests that the 15% year-over-year increase in homicides recorded in 2023 hasn’t lost momentum. The overwhelming majority of the victims were black or Hispanic.
The Dallas Police Department has made significant efforts to focus on preventing crime through community initiatives and a hot-spot approach to policing, as covered in The Dallas Express. Despite this, DPD has been laboring under a significant and longstanding staffing shortfall.
Although the City previously recommended policing with 4,000 officers in an analysis based on Dallas’ population size, DPD currently fields only about 3,000 officers. It has also been given a budget of only $654 million by City officials this year, which is considerably less than the sums spent in comparably high-crime municipalities, such as Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles.
Downtown Dallas bears the brunt of these challenges, with comparative studies showing it logging considerably higher rates of crime over Fort Worth’s downtown area, which is patrolled by a specialized neighborhood police unit and private security guards.