A man killed his girlfriend Thursday in Chicago after their teenage daughter had reported the couple missing last week from their Texas home, according to Cook County prosecutors.
Kendrick Owens, 38, was ordered held with no bail Saturday as he faces a first-degree murder charge in the fatal shooting of 36-year-old Tiwaconda Williams, court documents show.
Owens and Williams left their Fort Worth, Texas, home on April 7 in a white 2012 GMC Yukon, prosecutors said. Their 14-year-old daughter told family members that her parents never came back home, and that a handgun was missing from the home.
A missing person report filed with Fort Worth police a few days later noted that officers found loose .9 mm ammunition next to an empty ammunition box on Williams’s bedroom floor, prosecutors said.
Five days after the couple left home, they pulled up next to a Chicago Police squad car about 6:40 a.m. Thursday in the West Garfield Park neighborhood, prosecutors said. Owens, in the driver’s seat of the same white GMC Yukon, started a conversation with an officer, then started crying and drove away. The officer took down the vehicle information and noted it had Texas license plates.
About half an hour later, Owens stopped the SUV in the 4300 block of West Madison and shot Williams once in the neck, prosecutors said. He got out and ran to the back porch of a nearby home. Officers responding to the area for a call of shots fired found the running GMC with no driver and Williams in the passenger seat with a gunshot wound to the neck.
Paramedics took her to Stroger Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 7:32 a.m., the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office said.
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Owens was arrested on the porch and admitted to paramedics and officers that he had shot Williams, prosecutors said. Officers found a .9 mm handgun with a fired shell casing “stove piped” back into the ejection chamber. The officer who had spoken to the couple half an hour earlier showed up to the scene and identified both Owens and Williams.
Owens had been sentenced to probation in April 2017 for a criminal mischief conviction in Fort Worth, court documents show. His only other criminal history is two misdemeanor convictions in Chicago.
He’s next scheduled to appear in court on Monday.
