A Chicago man faces up to natural life in prison after a jury convicted him of the slayings of three men whose bodies were found inside an abandoned car on the Southwest Side in 2010, according to prosecutors and court records.
Roberto Cerda, 30, faced murder charges in the deaths of Andres Butron, 34, Ernesto Aleguin, 42, and Hector Romero, 28, and was convicted Wednesday following a trial before Cook County Judge Timothy Joseph Joyce, according to court records. He faces sentencing May 2, according to state’s attorney’s office spokeswoman Tandra Simonton.
The bodies of the three men were discovered May 18, 2010, near West 48th Place and South Whipple Street.
Cerda, of the 5600 block of South Trumbull Avenue, was part of a drug trafficking crew that would also rob and kill some of its potential buyers, law enforcement sources told the Tribune at the time he was charged. Investigators suspected the crew killed at least 12 people, with the May 2010 slayings among them, the sources said.
The man believed to be chief of the crew, Arturo Ibarra, was shot and killed by Chicago police after leading them on a chase on the North Side on Feb. 26, 2011. The chase began after the drug-related stabbings of three men — two of whom died — and the shooting of a Chicago police officer, crimes that authorities believe Ibarra and two other members of his crew, Raul Segura-Rodriguez and Augustin Toscano, committed.
Segura-Rodriguez and Toscano are charged in connection with those crimes and are still awaiting trial. Segura-Rodriguez also was charged in the drug-related killings of four other men whose bodies were found in a Southwest Side garage in September 2010.