Oct. 17--Pat Cregan was a newly married pizza delivery driver out making his last run of the night.
Nick Hernandez was a recent high school graduate minutes away from home in his mother's blue Ford Escape.
Each was driving through Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood in early morning Aug. 2, 2009, when their paths tragically crossed with Ricardo Marchan, who fatally shot Cregan and Hernandez with a high-powered rifle while roaming West Side streets in his beat-up black Chevrolet Blazer.
It took just three minutes for Marchan to end the lives of two strangers. Investigators told both victims' families that he had gone on the shooting spree in anger over his breakup with his girlfriend a few days earlier.
In a city beset by gun violence, their killings attracted little media attention.
Last week, relatives of the two victims, holding hands in the front row of the Cook County courtroom, broke into tears at word that the jury had convicted Marchan, now 31, of both murders. He faces mandatory life imprisonment.
"A piece of my heart is gone, it's gone," said Cregan's mother, Ann Felleti, 60. "You do that because your girlfriend breaks up with you? To me that makes no sense."
"My son never came home," said Liza Burgos, 43, Hernandez's mother. "It felt like a part of me was dying. ... I would never want anyone to feel that pain or that heartbreak or sadness. It's a heartbreak that I can't even explain."
Prosecutors said at the trial that they didn't know for sure what motivated Marchan, but they described the spree as a thrill killing, calling Marchan a "mobile sniper" who killed for the fun of it and acted as if he was living out a fantasy from the popular, violent "Grand Theft Auto" video game.
"He goes hunting -- not for deer, not for elk," Assistant State's Attorney Karin Swanson told jurors. "He goes hunting for people, specifically for young men driving alone in their cars. He goes looking to kill random strangers."
Marchan was arrested shortly after the slayings when he tried to rob two others on the street. Police found 21 fired shell casings, a 9 mm Winchester rifle with a 10-round magazine and a box of ammunition inside his SUV.
Hernandez was killed right outside St. Elizabeth's Hospital, shot twice in the back and once in the side of the head about 4:10 a.m., prosecutors said. A passing taxi driver testified he thought at first that the 18-year-old was a drunken driver who had passed out and struck a parked car in the 1500 block of Western Avenue.
Hernandez had graduated five weeks earlier from Lakeview High School. He woke early every weekday and drove his mother to her job as a nurse's assistant at Kindred Hospital in Northlake, then went to classes.
He wanted to become a pilot, his mother said. Hernandez had taken his stepbrother, who was going through a difficult time, out that night.
"He was a homebody," Burgos said. "There are kids out there looking for trouble and in gangs, and here's my son just coming home. What are the chances of that happening?
"This gun made (Marchan) feel so invincible," said Burgos, whose own father was slain when she was an infant. "I lost my father, I lost my baby, and it's devastating."
At 4:13 a.m., Marchan fatally shot Cregan as he drove south in the 1400 block of North California Avenue. Cregan was trying to deliver his last order for Village Pizza, a restaurant owned by a relative, but had been sent to the wrong address by co-workers, his family said.
"He really was in the wrong place at the wrong time," his mother said.
Cregan, who was still known by his family as "Little Pat" even though he stood over 6 feet tall, left behind a wife he'd married only two months earlier as well as a then-9-year-old son from a previous relationship.
"He didn't deserve that," said his father, Patrick Cregan Sr. "Going out just shooting people on the street -- that's crazy. (Marchan's) a coward."
The two robbery victims gave a chilling account at trial of what happened that night minutes after the two robberies in the Logan Square neighborhood.
Testifying in Spanish, Jireh Hernandez, 29, said he had just returned home from a party and was smoking a cigarette outside in the 3800 block of West Dickens Avenue when Marchan's black SUV drove by, stopped and then backed up.
Marchan pointed the large, black Winchester rifle at him, demanded his belongings and threatened to kill him, Hernandez testified.
Armando Zamora, an older co-worker of Hernandez's who had just returned from the same party, came to his friend's aid.
"He said he was going to kill me," said Zamora, also testifying in Spanish. "I said why if I have not done anything to him? I just started laughing because I didn't think that (the rifle) was real. I thought it was pretend.
"He said, 'You want to see that this is real?' " Zamora testified.
Zamora said Marchan fired the rifle twice in the air and then shoved the still-hot gun barrel against his neck, burning him.
Prosecutors said Zamora's intervention may have saved his co-worker's life.
"When (Marchan) came upon a human being who talked back, it didn't feel like a game of Grand Theft Auto anymore," Assistant State's Attorney Ashley Romito told jurors Wednesday in closing arguments.
A neighbor heard the two shots and called police, according to trial testimony. Officer Jeffrey Muehlfelder also heard the shot and saw Marchan run to his SUV, he testified.
The officer boxed Marchan's vehicle in with his police SUV and arrested him.
When a prosecutor asked Muehlfelder how many spent shell casings he saw on the dash, floor and seats of Marchan's car, he responded, "Too many to count."
Two weeks later, ballistics testing tied the weapon to both slayings, prosecutors said.
Five days after burying her oldest son, Felleti said she awoke to a vision of him standing at the foot of her bed.
"He kept telling me, 'Don't worry ma, it's going to be OK,' " she said. "I don't know if he knew that's what I needed, but it's kind of helped me to live with this."
Burgos still aches at the memory of her son, who would have turned 25 this year.
When the verdict was read, her head dropped and she began crying, but standing outside court an hour later she seemed relieved that the six-year journey through the criminal justice system was nearly over.
"Justice was served," she said outside the Leighton Criminal Court Building. "I'm grateful."
It was time to go to work.
She would have to drive herself.
sschmadeke@tribpub.com
