A Chicago man was found guilty of first-degree murder Thursday in the 2018 slaying of a Northwestern University doctoral student who had moved to the area only hours earlier.
Diante Speed, then 19, fired a volley of gunshots at a man who he claimed had brandished a gun at him as he and two friends were walking in the 7500 block of North Clark Street in Rogers Park the night of Sept. 2, 2018. One of the bullets hit Shane Colombo as the 25-year-old California native was walking home with two bags of odds and ends for his new home. Colombo, who had recently bought an apartment just over the city line in Evanston with his fiancé, was set to start a Ph.D. program.
Colombo’s mother, father and fiancé were seated in the courtroom gallery on the bench nearest to the jury box for each day of the three-day trial. Jurors deliberated for four hours Thursday before delivering their verdict.
Colombo’s mother gasped as the courtroom clerk read the guilty verdict. Speed lowered his head and pursed his lips.
In the courthouse lobby after the verdict, Colombo’s fiancé, Vincent Colores-Chalmers, said he planned to return to the intersection of Clark and Howard streets on Friday.
"(The verdict) made me realize how much I miss Shane,” Colores-Chalmers said, fingering a chain around his neck that held Colombo’s engagement ring.
“I feel like I lost a lot of time waiting. Today I feel like everything sped up.”
Local
Colombo’s tragic story — a young Ph.D. student who wound up dead just a few hours after moving to Evanston from California — captured media attention in the fall of 2018. As the investigation stalled, Colombo’s family and community groups raised $12,000 in reward money for tips, with police circulating still photos of the suspects taken from blurry surveillance camera footage.
A break in the case came nearly a year later, when the gun that fired the bullet that killed Colombo turned up when a man was arrested in South Holland. The man caught with the gun said he had bought the gun from a friend of Speed.
Feeling out of the loop? We'll catch you up on the Chicago news you need to know. Sign up for the weekly> Chicago Catch-Up newsletter.
Cameras mounted on nearby buildings and inside an ATM captured Speed and his friend, Charles Moore, chasing a third man in a white tank top, as well as Colombo falling to the pavement as he carried two shopping bags on his way home. Speed, Moore and a third friend, Juwan Garrett, said they were walking along Clark Street when a car pulled up, and a man in a white tank top, whom they did not know, brandished a weapon.
Surveillance cameras captured multiple angles on the ensuing foot chase, as Speed drew his gun and he and Moore took off after the man — but while one recording included the sound of two volleys of gunshots, none showed Speed actually firing the weapon.
Taken in for questioning after the gun was traced to him in 2019, Speed initially denied knowing anything about the shooting. After he was told there was video and ballistics evidence, he admitted chasing the man with a gun, but repeatedly denied that he’d fired any shots.
After some eight hours, Speed finally confessed — in a tearful phone call to his mother he made from the police interrogation room, with cameras and sound still rolling even after the detective left him alone with a cellphone, Assistant State’s Attorney James Papa said in his closing argument.
“You guys all got to hear at least one side of the conversation that he had with his mother, the person that you trusts the most, the person who brought him into the world,” Papa said. “His words: I did this. I didn’t do this on purpose. I was shooting and I hit an innocent. I hit a white dude and he’s dead.”
But Speed’s attorney, Assistant Public Defender Sarah Fransene, cited other portions of conversation with his mother that backed up Speed’s story that he opened fire only after the man in the tank top had shot at him.
“Somebody tried to get me. We were walking down the street and there was a dude and dude started looking at us crazy and he pulled a gun,” Fransene said, quoting Speed. “We was shooting and I made a mistake and I hit an innocent.”
“Of course it’s not right, it’s possibly reckless to shoot on a Chicago street and it’s stupid to be carrying a gun in the first place,” Fransene said. “Diante was 19 years old and did not consider his actions … it was senseless, it was awful, horrible and any other adjective you want to use, but you can’t let sympathy influence your decision.”
As he left the courthouse, Colores-Chalmers said Colombo survived childhood cancer, put himself through college and graduate school and did volunteer work. His example, and his senseless death, Colores-Chalmers said, inspired him to channel his grief into helping others.
“We need to instill community and a life where we develop more Shanes,” he said. “And not develop a place where boys and girls have to go in the streets and feel like they have to carry guns to defend themselves.”
