Family of 6 found dead in Chicago home were targeted “police say”

Six people were found dead Thursday afternoon in a home in the Gage Park neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side. A relative said they were members of the same family, and two children are among the dead.

The victims—two men, two women and two boys ages 10 and 13, three generations of the same family—were found slain Thursday afternoon on the Southwest Side after police checked on the well-being of a man who didn’t show up to work for days, authorities said.

Family members identified the victims as Noe Martinez and his wife, Rosa; their adult children, Noe Jr. and Herminia; and Herminia’s two boys, Alexis and Leonardo.

Officers were called to the brick bungalow in the 5700 block of South California just after 1 p.m. The victims were found “in different locations” in the home, police said Friday morning.

“This is a complex investigation, we are working meticulously,” Chicago Police Chief of Detectives Eugene Roy said at a morning press conference.

There were no signs that anyone forced their way into the house, nor was the house ransacked, Roy said. He declined to say whether the victims had been stabbed, but said there were no signs of gunfire in the home. Media reports said some of the victims had been beaten to death.

Roy said the victims, killed between Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday afternoon, had not been tied up as some media initially reported.

A man who works at a Chicago maintenance company called 911 to check on the house because a co-worker who lived there had not come to work since Tuesday.

“He was just a really great guy,” the man who made the call told the Chicago Sun-Times.

Agencies/Canadajournal