A man free on bail and awaiting trial in the 2008 slaying of a 10-year-old girl was arrested today on charges he and eight other people beat someone he thought was taking pictures of his girlfriend Sunday at a South Side beach, authorities said.
Luis Peña, 23, faces murder charges with three other men in the shooting of Nequiel Fowler, known to family as Nee-Nee, as she helped her 5-year-old blind sister walk through an alley on Sept. 1, 2008.
After being charged with misdemeanors in what police say was a 10 p.m. Sunday attack in the parking lot of Rainbow Beach, Peña was arrested today after a status hearing on the murder case and is being charged with armed robbery, said his attorney, Steven Greenberg.
“I find it awfully odd that he was charged with misdemeanors, and now he’s been arrested on a felony,” Greenberg said today.
Peña originally was charged with battery, theft, unlawful use of a weapon, aggravated assault and possession of marijuana, police said.
Pena was at the Rainbow Beach parking lot, 3111 E. 77th St., Sunday evening, when Peña showed a man a handgun as he asked if the man had been taking pictures of Peña’s girlfriend, said Chicago Police News Affairs Officer Daniel O’Brien. Peña asked several people who were with him to take the man’s cell phone from him, and he and the others began punching and kicking the man, O’Brien said.
At some point, police officers arrived at the parking lot and saw the group that had attacked the man trying to leave, police said. Police stopped Peña and the others, and when the officers talked to the man, he told them Peña had held the gun on him as Peña told the others with him to get the man’s cell phone. Details on the other eight people arrested were not available.
Peña was in police custody this afternoon, Greenberg said.
Prosecutors allege Nequiel’s shooting came after Peña told a man he is now scheduled to be tried with, Antoine Lacy, that he wanted to shoot rival gang members.
Peña used a gun given to him by one of two other men charged with Nequiel’s murder to spray an alley in the 8700 block of South Escanaba with bullets to try to shoot members of the Latin Kings, just as Nequiel was tying her sister’s shoes in the alley.
Nequiel had been set to start school the next day. Her sister did not realize she had been shot. Peña originally had been held without bail in the case, but has been free since after he had his bond reduced in April 2009, according to prosecutors and court records. Peña has a tentative trial date of Nov. 14, and is due back in court on the murder charge on Sept. 26, said Tandra Simonton, a spokeswoman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.
Peña has denied, through his attorney, that he shot Nequiel. Also charged with murder in the case are Joseph Chico and Raymond Jones, but they are scheduled to be tried separately.
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