No bail for teens charged with Far South Side killings of two friends
Two teenage boys were denied bail Sunday as they face charges in the shooting deaths of two teens who lawyers said were their friends.
Leslie Ward, 17, and Kahlil Colone, 16, were each charged with two counts of first-degree murder in the August killings of 16-year-old Raysuan Turner and 17-year-old Darnelle Flowers, who were found dead two days after they had been shot in a Far South Side field. Both teens are being charged as adults.
Cook County Judge John Fitzgerald Lyke Jr. called the allegations “the epitome of evil” at the teens’ initial court appearance on Sunday. Sitting in the courtroom gallery were Turner’s father, stepmother and mother, who said the four boys were friends for years.
“They trusted them and they never saw this coming,” said Rayneicia Morris, Turner’s mother. “They didn’t know they had a dark cloud behind them when they walked in that park.”
Witnesses on Aug. 17, the day of the shooting, overheard Ward tell Colone that they needed to “get rid” of Flowers and Turner because they “had money on their heads,” prosecutors said on Sunday without elaborating. Colone told Ward that he asked Turner and Flowers to meet up at Golden Gate Park, according to Assistant State’s Attorney Daniel Crone.
Once at the park, the group went into a wooded area near 131st Street and Rhodes Avenue, before Colone came back out and asked two different witnesses — who he and Ward knew — to hold onto a pair of cell phones, Crone said. When he went back into the woods, gunfire erupted and the witnesses ran away.
Meanwhile, Morris — Turner’s mother — reported her son missing.
Two days after the shooting, Morris was standing in a Chicago police station about 11:30 p.m. when she got a text from an anonymous woman saying she could find her son’s body in the field near the park.
Morris informed police, who searched the area and found the two bodies just before midnight, Crone said.