Man Found Shot To Death Near Howard Street CTA Red Line Station

EVANSTON, IL — One man was killed and another wounded in a shooting Thursday near the CTA Red Line station on Howard Street, police said.

The body of Evanston's first homicide victim of 2020 lay shielded by a screen and surrounded by more than a dozen evidence markers as investigators from the North Regional Major Crimes Task Force, or NORTAF, collected evidence from a crime scene that spanned multiple blocks on both sides of the station.

Shortly before 1:15 a.m., an argument on Marshfield Avenue near Howard Street turned violent, police said. The nature of the argument was not immediately clear.

When officers arrived, they found the victim laying on the sidewalk outside the entrance to the station. Chicago Fire Department paramedics were unable to revive him, and he was pronounced dead prior to 1:30 a.m., according to Evanston police and the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office.

The dead man was later identified as 20-year-old Brian Carrion, of unincorporated Glenview.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Chicago police found a second victim nearby. A 21-year-old Evanston man managed to escape serious physical injuries when he suffered a graze wound to the head.

Police said he was taken to St. Francis Hospital, where he was treated and released Thursday morning.

Investigators taped off a portion of the 7600 block of Marshfield Avenue to collect evidence Thursday morning.

Half a block away, a bullet went through a window of a restaurant on the corner of Marshfield and Howard, with investigators finding fragments inside.

Restaurant staff said they closed up and left shortly after 10 p.m.

A glass window was also broken at a cafe across the street. An employee sweeping up the glass said it was the second time in the past few weeks the business had been struck by gunfire.

More than half a dozen security cameras are positioned to have potentially captured some of the events that led up to the killing.

Investigators from NORTAF, the suburban interagency task force, continued to contact property owners and managers in the area Thursday afternoon to collect available footage along Howard Street from about Ashland Avenue to Clark Street.

Thursday's fatal shooting is the first to take place in Evanston in more than a year. Sandoval Cobian, 39, remains jailed awaiting trial on charges of first-degree murder in connection with the March 2019 fatal shooting of 33-year-old Angel Miranda, who prosecutors said had been involved with a former romantic partner of Cobian's.

In the Chicago Police Department's 24th District, which includes the Rogers Park neighborhood along Evanston's southern and eastern borders, there have been at least five incidents classified as murders — up from three at this point last year — and more than two dozen shooting incidents in the district so far this year, an increase of 73 percent compared to 2019.

The last firearm homicide in or around the Howard Street Red Line station was the fatal shooting of 20-year-old Macksantino Webb. Accused of shooting him in the back, Keith Gross, a 30-year-old parolee with a record of convictions for violent crimes, has been charged with murder.