Aurora cops still probing two unrelated shooting deaths
Aurora police on Tuesday continued to investigate a pair of unrelated homicides that took place within an hour of each other Monday night on the city's west side.
In the first case, police are searching for two men they believe were involved in a shooting inside the La Torta restaurant in the Northgate Shopping Center on the 800 block of North Lake Street.
In the second, police had a 45-year-old Aurora man in custody in connection with the fatal shooting of an Aurora woman resulting from an apparent domestic dispute.
Police have identified the victims of both shootings.
Arin T. Williams, 20, of Aurora was shot at 7:35 p.m. inside the restaurant's bathroom, police said in a statement.
Williams apparently arrived with two other men described as black males, one of them about 5 feet, 8 inches tall and the other around 6 feet tall, authorities said. Police said the three men entered a bathroom inside the establishment and began to fight, and Williams was shot once in the head during the altercation.
The two male suspects were seen running east from the scene, police said. Williams was pronounced dead shortly after arriving at an Aurora hospital.
Officers said they believe the shooting was drug-related.
Although no one is in custody in that shooting, police said there are several leads.
In the second case, police said Rachel Taylor of Aurora was apparently arguing with a 45-year-old man outside a house when she was shot multiple times in the abdomen.
Taylor was taken to an Aurora hospital by paramedics and pronounced dead shortly after arrival. The suspect, an Aurora resident, was in custody Tuesday and charges are expected to be announced this morning.
The Aurora Police Department's Domestic Violence Reduction Unit is investigating the second shooting.
Aurora, the second-largest city in Illinois, at one time in the 1990s averaged one murder a month. In 2012, the city reported no murders for the first calendar year since 1946. That streak without a murder ended in February 2013 when three men were charged after a woman was fatally beaten with a hammer and burned.