One man was acquitted and one convicted today in the August 2008 slaying of a pizzeria manager mistaken for a rival gang member on the Near West Side.
Anthony Collazo, 19, was acquitted by a Cook County jury of first-degree murder after a three-day trial before Judge Stanley Sacks. The judge convicted co-defendant Gabriel Contreras, 28, of first-degree murder after hearing the evidence in a simultaneous bench trial.
Sentencing for Contreras is set for June 13.
Prosecutors said the defendants, both Satan Disciples, were out for revenge after Contreras had been shot in the shoulder by a member of the rival C-note gang.
The victim, Jason Mueller, was walking at Grand and Wolcott Avenues on Aug. 10, 2008 about 5:30 a.m. trying to hail a cab after he drove a friend’s car home from Religion nightclub at 720 N. Wells St. Prosecutors alleged the defendants mistook him for a C-note, walked up to him and Collazo shot him.
The state’s case rested primarily on third-party admissions that Collazo allegedly made to two people in the months following the shooting, one of them to a paid confidential informant for the police, the other to a fellow gang member who testified to a grand jury about Collazo’s admission.
Collazo’s attorney, Joseph Lopez, said in his opening that “nobody really knows who killed this individual, but it wasn’t Anthony Collazo. There is no physical evidence, no scientific evidence that ties my client to the scene.”
Mueller, who helped operate Nonna's Pizza in the Old Town neighborhood, was apparently walking to Grand Avenue to catch a cab home after escorting home a friend, with whom he had been drinking, when he was shot in the street.
"This guy had zero enemies," Walt Oestmann, a roommate and a fraternity brother from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told the Tribune shortly after the shooting.
Mueller, who grew up in the Mt. Greenwood neighborhood on the Far Southwest Side, did not have any gang affiliations or a criminal record, police said.
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Two gang members accused of slaying pizzeria manager - Marist HS graduate
Jason Mueller was looking for a cab after he escorted his friend back to her Chicago apartment in the early morning hours of Aug. 10, 2008.
Little did the pizzeria manager know, two street gang members were on the prowl and mistook him for a rival gangster, gunning him down in the street, Cook County prosecutors said Tuesday at the opening of the trial for Mueller’s accused killers.
Anthony Collazo, 19, and Gabriel Contreras, 28, allegedly sought revenge because they believed a rival gang member had wounded Contreras days before.
“‘I took care of that,’” Collazo said, bragging about his role as the gunman in Mueller’s slaying, a Collazo acquaintance, Daniel Chartrand, testified. “He said it was retaliation for ‘Trigger’ (Contreras) getting shot in the shoulder.”
When Chartrand, a police informant, was questioned by Collazo’s attorney, Joseph Lopez, Chartrand admitted that he didn’t share Collazo’s statements with detectives until three months after Collazo spoke to him about the killing. Collazo told him how he ran out of a car and pointed a handgun at Mueller at Grand and Wolcott avenues, Chartrand testified.
Chartrand received $1,100 for his tip to police. Lopez insinuated that Chartrand was motivated to make up a story to further cash in on the $10,000 reward money being offered for clues in Mueller’s murder.
A Marist High School graduate, Mueller attended the University of Illinois and earned a master’s degree in business from DePaul University. He worked as an analyst for the Nielsen Company for four years, but his entrepreneurial spirit led him away from the corporate world and into the restaurant business.