A 21-year-old man used a rifle to fatally shoot two men who had gotten into a fight with the man’s father when he thought he had been “disrespected” last July 4, prosecutors said.
Thomas Bishop, 21, shot Robert Cotten, 35, and Corey Hudson, 34, about 2:35 a.m. in the parking lot of a strip mall at 63rd Street and Seeley Avenue on July 4, 2014, after Bishop’s father had left following a fight with Cotten and Hudson, prosecutors said Wednesday. Bishop was charged with first-degree murder and ordered held without bail midday Wednesday in a hearing before Cook County Judge Donald Panarese Jr.
Cotten and Hudson were among 82 people shot, 14 of them fatally, over the July 4 weekend last year in Chicago.
The two men were killed in front of a salon where children were getting their hair done overnight, with shell casings littering the sidewalk and bullet holes in a nearby gyros restaurant.
Hudson, Cotten and several other people were in the parking lot early July 4 and Bishop’s father got into a fight with the two men because he “felt he had been disrespected,” according to a court document.
During the dispute, Bishop left the strip mall to get a rifle, and parked on Seeley in front of the mall when he returned, prosecutors said. By the time he got out of his car with the assault-style rifle, the dispute had ended and his father and two other people had left.
Bishop shot at both Hudson and Cotten, hitting Hudson 10 times and grazing him twice and hitting Cotten four times, including a gunshot wound to the back of the head, prosecutors said.
Hudson, of the 6500 block of South Bell Avenue, was pronounced dead at 3:02 a.m. July 4 at Holy Cross Hospital, while Cotten, of the 9600 block of South Mozart Street in Evergreen Park, was pronounced dead July 6, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
Bishop drove off with the rifle following the shooting.
Police found 19 shell casings at the scene.
Detectives tracked down several witnesses to the shooting, and at least one picked out Bishop’s photograph as being that of the gunman, prosecutors said. Others said they saw him get back in his car with the gun. And surveillance video from a nearby business showed Bishop at the scene during the dispute, returning at the time of the shootings, and fleeing the scene afterward, prosecutors said.
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Bishop has pending drunken driving and felony criminal damage to property cases against him in Eureka, Ill., and also was free on bail in a felony marijuana-possession case in Chicago at the time of his arrest, according to prosecutors and court records.