Previously on Somebody…

SHAPEARL: The first car that we thought were the police? That was not Courtney’s vehicle in the lead.

BRENT: OK.

SHAPEARL: ...and they found some new evidence that said that it may have happened the way the police stated.

JAMIE: The metaphor of walking back an assumption feels exactly right. You’re really trying to reorient and reboot really, the entire investigation.

SHAPEARL: Every part of me wants to believe that my son could have survived. Every part of me.

RUSHIN: It looks like they are handcuffing a suspect to bring him in for an arrest.

My name is Shapearl Wells. This is the story of my son 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 search for the truth.

This is Somebody.

THEME: “Everybody’s Something” by Chance the Rapper 

COURTNEY: [snoring]

This is a video of Courtney sleeping…

ROCIO: Babe, still want to go out?

COURTNEY: [snoring]

It’s taken a few years ago by his girlfriend at the time, Rocio. 

ROCIO: Babe, BABE!!!! 

ROCIO: Do you still want to go out?

COURTNEY: Yep

ROCIO: Turn up?

COURTNEY: Turn it up.

ROCIO: Get up then. 

Rocio and Courtney. They were one of those on again, off again couples. But everyone knew that Rocio was the love of his life. She always felt like a daughter to me...and still does.

SHAPEARL: Can you show us your tattoo?

ROCIO: This is it. But it’s actually Courtney’s name and the date we started officially dating. It’s kind of funny. It was 11/12/13. I made him wait a day to ask me out the next day so it could be 11/12/13. [laughing]

Courtney was very caring and, for Rocio, she received all of that. He’d make her breakfast. He’d pack her lunch. He’d even, sometimes, he’d watch her niece for her..

SHAPEARL: He’s like, “Oh, this kid I’m takin’ to school, and I’m babysitting her…” And I’m like, “You’re doing what?!”

ROCIO: Yeah, He just loved kids…

Rocio and Courtney joined WorldVentures at the same time. She also got a BMW as a sales reward. Courtney’s was maroon and Rocio’s was champagne.

ROCIO: I’m kind of competitive, so as soon as Courtney pulled it out I was like, I have to go get mine, too.

But at WorldVentures...Courtney had a lot of other female coworkers.

MARILYN: You know Courtney really loved women.

That’s Marilyn. She worked with Courtney. She saw all the drama around him.

MARILYN: There was always an incident with something like oh you know you're flirting with this girl or you're talking to this girl...we can't keep 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.

SHAPEARL: When I think about all these other women that it seems that he had a relationship with, they were, to me, just filling the gap. 

Here I am, talking to Alison from the Invisible Institute about all of this. 

ALISON: Do you know why he and Rocio broke up? 

SHAPEARL: Because he was cheating.

ALISON: Oh. Bummer.

SHAPEARL: She found out that he was cheatin’.

I knew Courtney had a lot of little girlfriends, 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.

COURTNEY: The thing about me is that you know it looks good on the outside but sometimes it can be bad behind closed doors. And 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 2015, Courtney’s boss sat him down more than once and told him he needed to stop dating people from WorldVentures. 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, 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...

MARILYN: A lot of people were very, very upset with her.

Courtney’s co-worker, Marilyn again.

MARILYN: …because first of all we had no idea, 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 ex-boyfriend saw something and got upset that Courtney was there. You know so many things ran through our head. And of course the first thing to do was blame her because...why were you even there?

A few hours after Courtney died, the police went to see Alma 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 she didn’t hear anything. She didn’t see anything. Just that Courtney had texted her saying he was outside her house. And then he never showed up.

ALISON: I wonder if they would have blamed her if they hadn’t been romantically involved. I feel like people do that to women, you know?

SHAPEARL: You could see the pain on her face that she felt some sort of guilt. And I told her that very day, you can't feel guilty. Courtney…Courtney, Ultimately Courtney made the choice. He unfortunately made a choice that was deadly for him.

The more I learned about Alma, the more I understood this wasn’t just a hook-up situation. It was starting to get serious and he was trying to bond with her kids and he was over there 3, 4 nights a week.

It had been more than a year since my last meeting with police, and…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 gonna be any help - so Alison and I? 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…and the exact timing of his interactions that last night.

We got help from this digital forensics expert, Dr. Ashley Podhrasky who volunteered her time to go through Courtney’s phone. 

PODHRASKY: Hi Alison

ALISON: Hi Ashley, how are you?

PODHRASKY: I’m doing good, how are you doing?

ALISON: I’m doing very well, thanks….

She has these tools to scrape every bit of information off the phone, and organize it so we could find any clues that were there.

PODHRASKY: So I’m actually sending you something right now. You should get an email from DropBox.

ALISON: I did...

She’s based in South Dakota, so we had to send her Courtney’s phone. I was 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. Plus it came back with a detailed log of all of Courtney’s calls, texts, with time stamps as accurate as they can get. 

I combed through them with my family. 

AUNT: When did he make the 911 call?

SHAPEARL: At 1:16:53. 

AUNT: So from 1:11 it'd have to be about 1:12 now after this ok I'm going gotta be 1:12 now. 

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.

COURTNEY: Get my swag on

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 saying “top of the morning” at 9:38 am. She wrote back a few hours later, and then they were texting all afternoon. Lots of heart emojis.

He messaged her again about 10 pm from a World Ventures presentation. He was in the city, training a new recruit, KC.

KC: Everybody was really happy, like, by the end of the night we ended up listening to music and he was rapping which was really cool.

I found a photo of Courtney circled up around a kitchen table with some friends. He’s wearing his favorite red hoodie and everyone is holding dixie cups.

Courtney is doing a hand gesture. And basically it’s the “rock on” sign. Courtney was always doing the rock on sign in pictures. Rock on dude, you know!

Right about midnight, Courtney texted Alma saying, “I need to book a massage. Super sore.” 

Then Alma texted him back. “I got you.”

Courtney says, “When?”

And she wrote, “Today.” 

Then...just before one in the morning...Courtney headed to her house in Belmont-Cragin. 

On the way there, Courtney was just being his social butterfly self - he was on his phone, he was talking to friends and chatting on Facebook Messenger. 

He texted Alma “I’m outside.” 

She texted back: “What? Really?” 

And he was like,“Yup.” 

“OK I’m going”, she said...meaning that she was headed downstairs to open the gate.

From the phone records and parking tickets that we found, we know that Courtney and Alma had this little routine. He’d drive down her street. Cut through the alley and park 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’d arrived. So she’d go downstairs and open the gate for him.

They did this several nights a week. Over and over again. 

Alley. Park. Alma. Alley. Park. Alma.

And that night, on March 4th, 2016, Courtney sent his last text to Alma at 1:11 in the morning. 

But he never showed up at her door.

BALAZS: I've been living and ministering here for 19 years already.

ALISON: This is Father Richard Balazs. He’s a Catholic priest at the church on the corner, St. Stanislaus Bishop and Martyr. Father Balazs lives on the second floor of the church rectory. 

BALAZS: I know there was a shooting over here right in front of the rectory. Between the two streets there. I remember that, then they put flowers there, but I don't remember the name. I'm probably numb to a lot of this 

BILL: And what about that police station right there? Do you have any interactions with the police there ever?

BALAZS: Yeah. The policemen are very good to us. We used to have parish carnivals every year. And, of course, for security we had the police at that. The previous pastor stopped it because of gangs. 

SHAPEARL: The gangs. In Belmont-Cragin, it feels safe during the day...there’s parks and schools, but at night, it’s a different story.

GERRY: I have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 cameras. 

ALISON:  This is Gerry Brito. He’s a mechanic, who’s lived in Belmont Cragin for 25 years, down the street from the church where Courtney used to park to go to Alma’s. Gerry’s put up cameras all over his property. 

He says some years are quiet. Some years are really rough.

GERRY: Like when someone moves out and some other people move in, and they start selling drugs or they have people that are joining gangs and they bring the gangs over.

In Belmont-Cragin, the gangs are mostly Hispanic...you’ve got the Stylers, the Royals and the Pachucos. Then there’s the Four Corner Hustlers  - a black gang. They’ve all got their territories.

Gerry 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. 

GERRY: They always respectful and they try to do the best they can with what they have. 

And when the city’s cameras don’t work, the gangbangers know it.

GERRY: If they've been shooting they know that they can get away with it. Because 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 most critical camera. Courtney’s police file says that camera didn’t capture anything because of a DVR error. Shapearl and I have gone over this quite a lot. She’s still suspicious.

SHAPEARL: It just tells me like this whole POD cameras and all these things…I just don’t trust it.

ALISON: That camera would have shown Courtney going down that street and turning into the alleyway. 

And we’ve gone out to the neighborhood several times to track down other cameras…..to see if police missed any.

SHAPEARL: Did they get this one? I wonder if they got that. That has... 

SHAPEARL: Yeah so they have cameras too. I wonder if they got that address.

We did find 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. 

SHAPEARL: 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.

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.

SHAPEARL: Alma and I haven’t really been in touch. But now Alison 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’d never told me before. 

And I think it’s totally crazy that she would withhold this information. 

She said she 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. 

ALISON: Hey! Hi, there. You’re Alma? Hi, I'm Alison. Very nice to meet you. Thank you for setting aside the time. This is Bill…. 

In February of 2018...I arranged a meeting...me, Alison, our producer Bill...and Alma. 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.

ALMA: Oh you guys really were right around the corner. 

ALISON: Yeah I know you were probably like, “I don't want to go out in the cold.” No, we’re literally right around the corner.

 I sat next to Alma. Bill and Alison 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 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. 

Alma played us some videos of Courtney when we first sat down.

ALMA: This is like one of those good morning videos, like he was awake, what was everybody else doing? [Laughs] That’s him. He was always trying to make me laugh because I was always really serious. That was him all the time. He would say: Te gusta or no te gusta? Let's get it.

ALISON: Did the people you worked with know that you guys were romantically involved?

 ALMA: No.

 ALISON: Ok, so it was sort of on the downlow?

ALMA: Yessss.

 ALISON: Okay. How did you feel about that?

ALMA: Um, I was fine with that. It was, um. It was a little bit complicated just because of the way that our team is set up… 

They’d been keeping their relationship a secret for months, but Courtney had become close with her three kids.

ALMA: I told my son that Courtney passed and he asked me what happened and I told him that he was shot. And um he just started crying.

ALISON: Did he ask a lot of questions?

ALMA: Um. No. After that he just didn't want to be outside. He would always tell me we had to hurry up.

ALISON: Do you sense that the kids are still afraid?

ALMA: For a long time they were. Like, coming home from school, my son would say we have to hurry up because I don't want to die.

We went back to that night. We asked Alma to walk us through what she remembered.

ALMA: He messaged me like around, like close to one in the morning. And then he asked me if I was home, if he could come over.

She says 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.

ALMA: As she was telling me that, we heard two gunshots and a car drive off.

ALISON: And was that before or after you'd gone downstairs to be ready to open the door?

ALMA: No, that was before. We heard the gunshots as I was receiving the text message that he was there. So the text message came in and we heard the gunshots at the same time.

She went downstairs to open the gate, as usual, but Courtney wasn’t there. 

ALISON: What did you think happened at that point in time?

ALMA: I mean I was a little bit worried but it's not...It’s not unlike him to change plans quickly...

Alma says she heard gunshots right as she got Courtney’s text saying “I’m outside.” It was 1:11 am.

But that just didn’t make sense to us. 

Because we knew that just four minutes after Courtney texted 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 1:15 a.m. That was four minutes after he texted Alma and the forensic expert confirmed those times

Alison showed Alma the timeline we’d put together...

ALISON: We ha...

ALMA: At 1:15?

ALISON: Mhm. If you're hearing the shots here, obviously he's not going to be doing...he’s not going to be text--You know, he’s not going to be saying to Brandon, “nice bro you’re gonna kill it man.” So does this at all like revise in your brain what might have happened? Or like when you might have heard the shots? Does this refresh anything for you?

ALMA: No. Not really.

ALISON: It doesn’t make sense? Okay. But you're pretty confident that you heard the shots before you said, “OK, I'm going to go open the door.” It was between here and here?

 ALMA: Our text messages were back to back.

BILL: Did it sound distant or did it sound like it was really close? 

ALMA: It sounded close. 

BILL: Like outside the window close? Or...

ALMA: It was two of ‘em 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 distant.

ALISON: When you heard the shots, did you think, “Oh, that could be Courtney”? Or did it not even cross your mind?

ALMA: It didn't cross my mind because around that time there was just a lot of things going on in the neighborhood. So we had heard gunshots before. You know, it wasn't something that was out of the ordinary for us to hear. 

We kept asking Alma to replay this moment. Was she really sure about her timing? 

Alma’s in her bedroom with her roommate...there’s music on her headphones… and then they hear gunshots.

ALISON: How many shots?

ALMA: Two. 

ALISON: And did you all, like, 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?

ALMA: Well I had my headphones on so I took ‘em off and she's 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 Walgreens.

 ALISON: Did she see anything?

ALMA: 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 and down the street, like they were looking for something.

I couldn’t understand why it took Alma so long to speak up about this. I specifically asked her after Courtney died, more than once, if she had heard any shots. I was pissed off. 

SHAPEARL: And I know, I almost positive I asked “Did you hear anything?” But I never recalled you saying anything like that. So I was like...when you said that, I was like cuz when we were piecing together the timeline. 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 an important piece of information.

ALMA: Just at the time I wasn't sure and 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 her house that morning. She said no one even asked her about the shots. Instead, they asked her about the password to Courtney’s phone. 

ALMA: ...the password to his phone. I told him he has an iPhone. It's his fingerprint.

BILL: He didn't have a Password?

ALMA: No it's his fingerprint.

SHAPEARL: By the time we got the phone back the phone was unlocked. So they probably had to take his finger and unlock his phone.

The police got into Courtney’s phone just hours after he died. They put in their report that Courtney’s passcode 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.

ALMA: And they just looked at it. And they said it wasn't going to be much help and they just handed me back my phone.

BILL: How long did they have your phone for? 

ALMA: Maybe like 30 seconds, he just opened it and he looked up and down. 

ALISON: And they never asked you if you heard anything? They didn't consider you a witness?

ALMA: 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 in Courtney’s file about the police talking to Alma. 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 that night. 

ALMA: Courtney said something to me like you know we were at a birthday party. People were having drinks. 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. 

ALISON: Okay.

ALMA: I think he was just jealous of how Courtney was as a person and how other people reacted to him. I think that was really it. It wasn’t anything other than that. 

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 something like “Lord Forgive Me.” 

ALISON: Would he have even known that Courtney was en route to your place that morning?

ALMA: 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.

ALISON: So he was surprised to learn that you two were seeing each other?

ALMA: I don't think. I mean no one knows until now.

ALISON: And again you didn't feel like he could be involved in this in some way?

ALMA: No.

ALISON: Okay.

BILL: Like no chance or like, probably not?

ALMA: Probably not.

Since Courtney died, I’d been asking Alma about her other ex-boyfriends. She told me one was in prison. We looked it up: he was in for attempted murder. Another ex 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. 

ALMA: No, not who might have done it. I know that down the street from where I live, there's a house that... this guy like he's you know he's a gang 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 minute. Alma talked 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 to hold my tongue, ya’ll.

ALISON: When did you have the conversation with the guy who lives in that house about what he said happened?

ALMA: It was….I don't remember the exact date. It was 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 like my eye swollen and he asked me, you know, who hit me.  

BILL: You said you got punched in the face or you looked like you got punched in the face?

 ALMA: No I got punched in the face. 

 ALISON: Do you mind 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 days after Courtney died. 

ALMA: I was at Shapearl's house, talking to someone there. And I got punched in the face. 

ALISON: Wha? Who? Shapearl, can you enlighten us?

SHAPEARL: It's 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. 

ALMA: We were just talking. They asked me what happened that day. I told them exactly what I remembered. And then in the middle of the conversation they said, “You killed my cousin,” and they punched me in the face.

 ALISON: Why did the person accuse you of that?

 ALMA: I don't know. That's just what he said.

SHAPEARL: Everybody was trying to find out what happened to Courtney. And everybody was trying to lay blame somewhere because it just didn't make sense. My family was like he shouldn't be over in that neighborhood. That's a 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 Alma since Courtney died...Why would she 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.

ALISON: Do you know his name?

ALMA: I don't. I just know...

ALISON: Do you know what he looks like?

ALMA: Yeah, he's shorter than myself. He has really long hair like down past his waist and he has a few tattoos. But he's always walking around the neighborhood. 

ALMA: The day after Courtney was shot, he said that his house was raided. 

ALISON: By whom?

ALMA: By the police. They came in searching his house.

I’d never seen anything about this guy in 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-Cragin passing out reward fliers, I do remember a man with long black hair standing on his deck. Talking on his cellphone. Just then a bunch of kids came out on bikes 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 filed it away. 

BILL: Thank you so much again for all your time. Yeah this was a lot of time.

ALISON: Thank you, Alma. 

ALMA: This was like therapy.

 SHAPEARL: You probably never talked about it right?

We said goodbye to Alma, and headed back into the cold.

The next day my Aunt Kim came over. 

AUNT KIM: Mmmmm...MM! 

Kim and I were raised like sisters because we’re so close in age.

AUNT KIM: I need to see the report that the police took on her. 

 I told her all the details of our interview with Alma.

SHAPEARL: I done reread this stuff a million and one times. I went over her testimony…

I told Kim about Alma hearing shots after all, the problems with her timeline, and this new story about the guy with the long hair. 

All the stuff the police 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.

KIM: When you, when you getting somebody and you interviewing them, you still asking them same questions just to see if it lines up. You want to know what you heard, did you see anybody running, how many shots? None of that 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 told HER that very night Courtney came in….  what they thought happened. A carjacking. 

CLARESSA: That they think someone had tried to carjack him. He sped away. They shot into the car, he drove to the police station, asked for help and said that he got shot, and that's when they called the paramedics.

SHAPEARL: This whole thing it just gets stranger and stranger by the minute. I have theories in my head. Who knows. But somebody covering for somebody. 

So when Alma told us that this longhair guy down the street said police raided his house, the day after Courtney died, we needed to know more. 

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 casings and everything.

So, a few weeks after our interview with Alma, Alison and Bill took a team to Belmont Cragin to find this guy.

ALISON: I’m gonna pull up to the church and then we can look and see if there’s any skidmarks.

SAM: Five dollar haircut.

ALISON: 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.

BILL: A five dollar haircut is so cheap.  

ALISON: We walked 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’s shooting. But he did remember that he was asleep that particular night. March 4, 2016. 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 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. 

ALISON: Hi, how’s it going? 

BRIANNA: Good. How are you?

ALISON: I’m Alison. Nice to meet you. Thank you for making the time. Did Alma explain what we’re doing?

BRIANNA: Of course. Yeah.

ALISON: So we’re investigating...

A few weeks later...Alma put us in touch with her former roommate, Brianna - the one she’d been living with when 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. 

BRIANNA: So when I heard it I went up to her and I had asked her if she had heard anything and she let me know that she was in her room, she had her headphones on so she couldn't hear anything.

Their stories didn’t fully line up.

But Brianna also remembered that guy who lived a few doors down...

BRIANNA: He had like longer hair. Black hair. And he had a couple tattoos.

ALISON: Do you know if he ever tried to talk to Alma?

BRIANNA: Just um they would pass by through the neighborhood and it was just a hi and bye as far as I know of. 

At the time of the shooting, in 2016, Brianna was dating Christian Hernandez....the guy who co-signed for Courtney’s BMW. 

So a few days after I talked to Brianna, Shapearl and I talked to Christian. He came over to Shapearl’s place with his new girlfriend and their baby…

ALISON: How old?

CHRISTIAN: 6 months.

ALISON: Oh wow. Congratulations. Boy or girl?

CHRISTIAN: Boy.

ALISON: OK. I have a little boy too. He’s 19 months old.

GIRLFRIEND: I can’t wait until he gets big.[laughs]

ALISON: Oh, see I was saying the same thing...

We settled in around the dining room table and started talking. Christian said that right after Courtney died, at a candelight vigil Alma told him she had heard shots. 

CHRISTIAN: She told me when everybody was all outside right here with the candles. And I asked her, “Did you tell Shapearl?” She said, “Yes.”

But she did not tell Shapearl. And I talked to five of Courtney’s other friends who had been in touch with Alma in the days following. Alma didn’t tell them 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.

It was about Alma and something she posted to Facebook the same night I met with Brianna.  

CHRISTIAN’S GIRLFRIEND: I had something to say.

ALISON: Oh sure.

CHRISTIAN’S GIRLFRIEND: When were you going to tell them that the day she called you that...He went on Facebook and he seen...He showed it to me... Alma put an emoji with like the zipper face and like that I don't know what to call but it's doing this...and I told him like well that's weird.

Christian’s girlfriend made a sign with her hands. That thing Courtney always did in photos.

Alma had posted two emojis. The “rock on” emoji and the zipper face. 

Then she stopped responding to Shapearl’s text messages. Her lips were zipped. 

ALISON: How are you? Thank you for coming out. 

SHAPEARL: Thank you so much.  

JUNE: I'm June.  

ALISON: Hi.

SHAPEARL: If Alma wasn’t talking, we needed to find someone who would. So, a couple weeks later, we met up with a World Ventures guy named June. 

He’s a heavyset guy with a fuzzy beard. About 40 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. 

JUNE: I just wanna know who’s ready for a rooftop event. It’s gonna be exclusive, we’re going to have a hand-roller. He’s going to host the show. Tell us what’s in the tobacco. What the tobacco is worth. How to savor it, how to roll it

June knows a lot of people. 

JUNE: I got an ear to the streets. I talk to everybody, I treat everybody with the utmost respect so people respect me and they’ll help me whatever way they can. 

June wouldn’t say too much about his past with gangs...but, he did say this… 

JUNE: 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.

June came with us the first time we went around the neighborhood a couple days after Courtney died. 

JUNE: So, when I found out what had happened the first thing I did was reach out to the local gangbangers. Um. None of them took admittance to it. 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 oh this guy did it. Such as such did it. Because they know the innocent shoulda never gotten touched.

After asking around, June got a lead 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.

JUNE: They had said there were some Hispanic guys running around in that neighborhood. So, they had claimed it was a possibility that maybe they had confused him for somebody else. So, I had to follow that lead as well. 

ALISON: And what did you find out? 

JUNE: It was false. 

Hm. 

Before we left, June told us a bunch of rumors he heard about Courtney’s murder. He’d heard Courtney was killed while buying weed. He’d 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 gonna find them.