Accused Serial Killer Killed 6 Strangers Within a Year, Prosecutors Claim: ‘Disregard Toward Human Life’

A Chicago man has been charged with killing six people at random within a 9-month period — when he was just a teenager.

At a Wednesday press conference, Police Superintendent Larry Snelling of the Chicago Police Department announced that Antonio Reyes, now 21, has been charged with five felony counts of first-degree murder and four felony counts of attempted first-degree murder in the rash of random murders in 2020.

At the time the five new charges were brought against him, Reyes was already in custody at the Cook County Jail for the alleged murder of 26-year-old Luis Davalos-Garcia in June 2020.

Cook County State’s Attorney Eileen O’Neill Burke described the killings as “serial murders.”

Davalos-Garcia was parked outside his girlfriend’s house with a “baby on board” sign in his car window when he was shot to death, according to WGNTV.  At the time, Reyes may have been upset due to a recent breakup.

In 2022, Reyes allegedly used a shank to try to kill his cellmate at the Cook County Jail, State’s Attorney O’Neill Burke said at the news conference.

The five murders Reyes was charged with on Tuesday include the murder of a 31-year-old man on March 2, 2020; the murder of a 21-year-old man on April 5, 2020 (plus the attempted murder of an additional victim on that day); the murder of a 16-year-old boy on May 1, 2020; the murder of a 31-year-old man on Nov. 8, 2020; the attempted murder of three children between the ages of 3-9, also on Nov. 8; and the murder of a 20-year-old male on Nov. 9, 2020.

The three children he allegedly tried to murder that November were in the same vehicle with the adult victim, who was “killed in a barrage of bullets,” Snelling said.

A major break in the investigation came when shell casings from a .40 caliber handgun found in the summer of 2020 were linked to the gun used at other crime scenes, CPD Chief of Detectives Antoinette Ursitti noted at the conference.

Detectives also “combed through an immense amount of physical and digital evidence” that helped connect Reyes to the murders, Snelling said.

“When we are dealing with someone this violent, we have to remove them from the streets,” Supt. Snelling asserted. “This started when Mr. Reyes was a teenager.”

State’s Attorney O’Neill Burke noted that, “None of these people had ever met Antonio Reyes before, and there’s no reason to suspect Antonio Reyes had any reason to target them, but that’s exactly what he did.”

PEOPLE was unable to reach a lawyer for Reyes.

Reyes has pleaded not guilty to the new charges against him, per CNN. He’s slated to return to court on March 18.