Joshua J. Ford fired a shot into the air one night last September as a warning to a trio of people passing through his South Side neighborhood that they were not welcome.
When two of them returned to the 7700 block of South Stewart Avenue a little more than a half hour later, he opened fire on them, killing 34-year-old Richard Johnson, prosecutors alleged in court on Saturday.
Ford, of the 600 block of East 73rd Street, has been charged with murder and Saturday, a judge set bail at $900,000. Ford is scheduled to appear again in court on Monday.
Ford was identified as the person who walked up and opened fire at a vehicle multiple times as it traveled east in the in the Winneconna Parkway neighborhood about 2:40 a.m. Sept. 21, according to Chicago police.
While witnesses played a role in cracking the nearly year-old case, it was a ballistics test by the Illinois State Police that matched the bullets found at the scene of the shooting with a gun that police recovered from the trunk of Ford’s white Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, according to court records.
Detectives identified Ford’s car the day the shooting occurred. They obtained a search warrant and found a black Glock 40 caliber semi-automatic handgun with an extended clip in the trunk, court records show.
A similar 40 caliber bullet was recovered from Johnson’s head during an autopsy by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. However, there was no conclusive match between that bullet and the shell casings found at the crime scene, according to court records.
That wasn’t the bullet that killed Johnson, who lived in the 600 block of East 133rd Street in the Riverdale community on Chicago’s Far South Side. Rather, he died of a gunshot wound to the chest, according to the medical examiner’s office.
There was another shooter at the scene, who, according to court records, remains at large.
Johnson was shot by someone known to him, police said at the time.