One man was acquitted and one convicted today in the August 2008 slaying of a pizzeria manager mistaken for a rival gang member on the Near West Side.
Anthony Collazo, 19, was acquitted by a Cook County jury of first-degree murder after a three-day trial before Judge Stanley Sacks. The judge convicted co-defendant Gabriel Contreras, 28, of first-degree murder after hearing the evidence in a simultaneous bench trial.
Sentencing for Contreras is set for June 13.
Prosecutors said the defendants, both Satan Disciples, were out for revenge after Contreras had been shot in the shoulder by a member of the rival C-note gang.
The victim, Jason Mueller, was walking at Grand and Wolcott Avenues on Aug. 10, 2008 about 5:30 a.m. trying to hail a cab after he drove a friend’s car home from Religion nightclub at 720 N. Wells St. Prosecutors alleged the defendants mistook him for a C-note, walked up to him and Collazo shot him.
The state’s case rested primarily on third-party admissions that Collazo allegedly made to two people in the months following the shooting, one of them to a paid confidential informant for the police, the other to a fellow gang member who testified to a grand jury about Collazo’s admission.
Collazo’s attorney, Joseph Lopez, said in his opening that “nobody really knows who killed this individual, but it wasn’t Anthony Collazo. There is no physical evidence, no scientific evidence that ties my client to the scene.”
Mueller, who helped operate Nonna's Pizza in the Old Town neighborhood, was apparently walking to Grand Avenue to catch a cab home after escorting home a friend, with whom he had been drinking, when he was shot in the street.
"This guy had zero enemies," Walt Oestmann, a roommate and a fraternity brother from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told the Tribune shortly after the shooting.
Mueller, who grew up in the Mt. Greenwood neighborhood on the Far Southwest Side, did not have any gang affiliations or a criminal record, police said.
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