Crime & Safety
Jury Selection Starting For Teen's Double Murder Trial
Sjolante Crowder. Credit: Will County Sheriff's Department
By Joseph Hosey
On the day he turned 19, jury selection started for Sjolante Crowder's murder trial.
Crowder was arrested in October and charged with killing two men and wounding another in a cowardly ambush shooting on Second Avenue.
The men killed in the shooting—Delasse Lanier, 18, and Adrian Knox, 17—and the wounded man, 19-year-old Jordan Caples, were standing in a crowd when Crowder allegedly slunk up behind them and opened fire at close range.
Lanier and Knox were pronounced dead at Silver Cross Hospital in New Lenox soon after the shooting. Caples, who took a bullet to his upper back, drove himself to Provena St. Joseph Medical Center and survived.
In the wake of the killings, the police said the gun attack stemmed from a fight between two young women earlier in the evening.The police also said the shooting was gang related.
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