Anthony Nunnally showed his latest girlfriend some television news footage from a memorial for slain 19-year-old Sierra Evans and gave her a chilling message, prosecutors alleged Wednesday.
During an argument, Nunnally told her he would “kill her like he killed his last girlfriend,” Cook County prosecutors said during a detention hearing at the Leighton Criminal Court Building.
That former girlfriend lived to give her account to detectives, prosecutors said, but they laid out allegations against the 21-year-old South Deering man accused of killing two other young women he dated in 2024 and 2025.
Cook County Judge Deidre Dyer ordered that Nunnally remain jailed while his trial is pending, finding that he poses a threat to friends, intimate partners and the wider community.
Assistant State’s Attorney Mike Pekara called Nunnally a “scary, stone-cold killer,” accusing him of killing the two teenagers about a year apart: Evans and 17-year-old Gabriella Arellano. According to a police report filed with the court, Nunnally is also suspected in a third killing, though he has not been charged in that homicide.
When the charges were filed, Nunnally was already held in the Cook County Jail in a pending carjacking case, according to court records.
“He’s certainly a danger to the entire community,” Pekara said.
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At the time she was killed, Arellano had been missing for several days. Her mother had dropped her off near 106th Street and Avenue O in the East Side neighborhood the afternoon of Oct. 17, 2025, according to a missing persons report.
Arellano had planned to return home that day, the report stated, but had stopped answering phone calls, using social media or showing up to her job at a nearby convenience store. Her mother reported her missing and her body ultimately was found in an alley between the 11000 blocks of Green Bay and Mackinaw avenues on Oct. 26, 2025.
About a year earlier, Evans’ body was also discovered in an alley in the 9500 block of South Avenue N on Sep. 28, 2024, police said.
Evans had been dating Nunnally for about a month at the time of her death, Pekara said. On the night of Sept. 27, the pair were hanging out with two friends.
The friends told investigators that Nunnally grew angry and jealous multiple times that night, at one point choking Evans against the wall until the two friends pulled him off her. Nunnally eventually left with Evans, and her body was found the next day, Pekara said.
Later, when Nunnally began dating someone else, he used the television footage of Evans’ memorial to threaten her, the new girlfriend told police.
In 2025, Arrellano had also been dating Nunnally for a short time before her death, Pekara said.
In the area where her body was found, the defendant was captured on a Ring surveillance camera running away after the sound of a gunshot, Pekara said.
While he was in custody for the alleged carjacking, Nunnally, who is allegedly a Latin Kings gang member, spoke to a former gang member who was cooperating with police and wearing a wire, Pekara said.
Nunnally told him he killed Arrellano because he believed she planned to betray him by giving his location to rival gang members who would kill him, Pekara said.
“You do what you gotta do, right?” Nunnally allegedly was recorded as saying.
But Nunnally’s public defender, Scott Kozicki, pushed back on the evidence, calling the jail recording “problematic entrapment-type statements.”
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He also noted that none of the witnesses who spoke to police reported actually seeing Nunnally shoot either of the women.
“They were drinking, they went to a house, and that’s what happened,” Kozicki said of witness accounts who spoke to police about the night before Evans’ death.
Pekara, though, pointed to the totality of information police gathered, which included surveillance video and other evidence.
“He was the last person seen with each of those young women,” Pekara said.