Colin Nutter was a young man from the North Shore on the brink of two worlds.
After minor scrapes with the law as a teen, by 20 he had taken some college classes and was eager to return to school. He worked two jobs and had bought his first car, according to his father, Michael Nutter.
“He was right on the verge of making some big changes in his life,” the father said Friday during an interview at the family’s Highland Park home, the day after his son’s funeral.
But police say Colin Nutter was also a small-time pot dealer whose two worlds collided with deadly force. A would-be sale June 3 to three other young North Shore residents was really a setup for robbery and homicide, according to investigators.
Although authorities say the three charged with first-degree murder planned their crime, a law enforcement source familiar with the investigation said Nutter might not have been their first choice as a target.
When the first dealer they chose had no marijuana to sell, they called Nutter instead, the source said. The deal was going down about 5:30 p.m. when Nutter, in the driver’s seat of his Dodge Stratus parked in Highwood, was shot in the back of the head, prosecutors said.
A person walking a dog found his body about 8:30 p.m. near the Edens Expressway in Wilmette.
The man accused of pulling the trigger, Benjamin Schenk 20, of Highwood, told people he was planning to rob and kill someone, Lake County State’s Attorney Mike Nerheim said. At one point before the slaying, Schenk had asked someone for gloves and duct tape, Nerheim said.
Schenk, the son of a U.S. Army colonel, had come to the area from abroad with his parents after attending high school in Germany, according to a Facebook page that has since been taken down. Charged with aggravated assault and free on $30,000 bail when Nutter was killed, Schenk had been living with another family in Highwood, according to court records.
Schenk’s father, Steven Schenk, is a defense coordinating officer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and recently transferred from Chicago to the Seattle area, FEMA officials said.
“We’re still in the shock and grief phase,” was the elder Schenk’s only comment when contacted by the Tribune. Defense attorney James Bertucci said it was too early in the investigation to discuss the case publicly.
Also charged with Nutter’s killing are Philip Vatamaniuc and Michael Coffee, both 17 and from Highland Park.
Savanna Richter, 19, graduated from Highland Park High School last year and remembered Vatamaniuc as “angry, kind of. Every time I talked to him he was just, ‘grrr.'”
She saw Coffee around but called him “an obscure figure” who didn’t seem to regularly hang out with Vatamaniuc, whom she described as well-known around the high school because he had friends in multiple circles.
On the day of the slaying, prosecutors said, Schenk, Vatamaniuc and Coffee got into Nutter’s Stratus, and he drove to a driveway at the dead end of a quiet residential neighborhood on Michigan Avenue in Highwood.
The area is by a grassy field and a pump station, just south of a nursing home, remote but not secluded, with homes close to the street. After the shooting, the young men put Nutter’s body in the trunk before leaving it near the expressway, prosecutors said.
The next day the group dropped Nutter’s car on Chicago’s West Side, but prosecutors say the young men were caught on a police video camera — common in the area, and recognizable for their blinking blue lights.
Schenk was arrested later that day, June 4, with the Nutter family’s Ford Focus at a house in Highwood, where the three defendants had gone after the killing, prosecutors said. Vatamaniuc and Coffee were arrested the next day, and prosecutors said they each named Schenk as the gunman.
“Sometimes there’s really no succinct answer as to what’s going through a person’s mind after they’ve committed a heinous murder like this,” said George Filenko, commander of the Lake County Major Crimes Task Force. “Some things are just unexplained.”
On Thursday, Nutter’s family and friends attended his funeral at Immaculate Conception Parish in Highland Park. Michael Nutter described his son as a “sweet, loving kid” who was known for being peaceful.
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“The thing that makes this really difficult is everyone who knew Colin loved him,” Michael Nutter said. “We’re not sure exactly what happened. We just want justice for our son.”
Portraits of Colin Nutter showed a smiling toddler, his bangs cropped in a straight line. There were snapshots from family vacations, a boy content on a boat, under a tree, in his mother’s embrace; and in teenage years, a pensive and handsome young man with dark eyes and flushed cheeks.
Colin Nutter was a gentle, funny and creative boy who adored his older sister, Sara, his father said. Never much of an athlete, he still enjoyed playing basketball — and loved the Bulls.
“Colin always had a lot of really close friends,” Michael Nutter said. “The irony is he never had enemies.”
School didn’t come easy for his son, who struggled with attention deficit disorder, Michael Nutter said. Colin Nutter ran into minor trouble in school, including a retail theft charge, which would later fuel his desire to become a social worker and help at-risk teens, his father said. He graduated from Highland Park High School in 2011.
Attending downstate Lincoln College, he enjoyed life and made new friends but fell behind on his credits, his father said. He returned home in December, with plans of working and saving money before enrolling at the College of Lake County in the fall.
Michael Nutter, 65, once served in the Peace Corps on the Marshall Islands and later met his wife, Angie, a nurse and a native of the Philippines. As manager of the cartography department at Encyclopaedia Britannica, he had planned on retiring soon to spend more time with his son. Now he feels adrift.
During an interview with the Tribune, the memory of hearing about the slaying caused him to pitch forward in grief, then gasp for air.
“It feels like a part of your life has been ripped away. In a stronger sense, it feels like my life has been destroyed,” he said. “I feel like I’m holding together by a few threads that could come apart at any minute. And I have to rebuild with what I have left.”
Angie Nutter said: “Colin was the sweetest person I’ve ever known. He had a good soul. And now he’s looking down on us.”
Three college roommates made the trip to Nutter’s funeral but also staged their own memorial outside the home they shared in downstate Lincoln. They signed their friend’s old shoes and flung them over a power wire in somber farewell, and vowed that their own shoes will follow.
“In 50 years, there’s going to be four pairs of shoes up there,” said Jonathan Jacks, Nutter’s college housemate. “That’s our final resting place now.”
After news of Nutter’s death, Jacks and the other two housemates — Jordan Sandrolini and Robert Shoemaker — were devastated.
In a short time, they had grown very close. They would sit around and “treat” one another, ridiculing in a humorous way. Nutter was a voice of reason in a house that could get rowdy.
“He was always the first to say, ‘Calm down,'” Sandrolini said. “It was hard to be mad around him.”
A hometown friend of Nutter’s paid a different form of tribute. Timmy Voltchek walked about 2 miles to attend his funeral.
As boys, Nutter and his friends walked all over Highland Park, goofing off in the parks, making short “Jackass”-style stunt films, venturing into the ravines of the lake bluff.
“Just to explore,” Voltchek said. “It felt like we had no boundaries.”
Standing in a circle just prior to the funeral, the childhood friends recalled adventures, pranks and sleepovers. Nutter was quiet, his friends said, but hilarious once they got to know him.
“If you were in a predisposed mood, he would always make you smile,” said Tristan Greenleaf, who had known him since preschool.
As the news of Nutter’s death came, his old neighborhood friends struggled with the realization of their worst fears. Voltchek said he stayed home all day to process it.
“Everyone was saying, ‘This can’t be happening in Highland Park,'” he said. “This can happen anywhere.”
Tribune reporter Dan Hinkel contributed.
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