Video footage shows man flee murder scene with weed, handgun, unsealed documents say

Tyrone Reno, of Chicago, was arrested Tuesday on a murder charge related to the death of Quintez Johnson, 31, of Gary. Charges were filed Nov. 20 and unsealed after the arrest. 

According to court documents, Gary police were dispatched around 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 15, 2021 to an apartment complex on the 1300 block of West Fifth Avenue. A trail of marijuana led police up the stairs and into an apartment where Johnson laid lifeless on a couch in the living room with blood on his face. 

Johnson died from two gunshot wounds to the head. His death was ruled a homicide by the Lake County coroner’s office.

Detectives reviewed security footage from the building that showed a man with a goatee wearing a black hooded sweatshirt with a white lining arrive at the apartment around 2 p.m. the day of the homicide. The man rang a buzzer, entered the apartment building and walked up the stairs to the third floor, documents state. 

Johnson can be seen letting Reno into his apartment unit on surveillance footage. Three minutes later, Reno bolts out of the apartment unit and down the stairs with a handgun and plastic bag, according to information in a probable-cause affidavit. He dropped some items and stopped to place some of them back in the bag. Detectives believe he left some of the marijuana behind, based on what they recovered from the stairwell. 

“Based on his demeanor, he appeared to be fleeing,” documents state. 

A few hours after the homicide, a detective was parked outside the Gary Police Department and saw a man who looked similar to the man in the footage walk past his vehicle. He stopped the man, who identified himself as Tyrone Reno, documents state.

Detectives pulled camera footage from the police department and discovered the man’s face matched the face in the footage from the apartment. They input images from the video in a facial recognition system and discovered a social media profile that had a photo of Reno’s face.

Reno’s formal court appearance is scheduled for Tuesday in Lake Criminal Court Judge Judge Salvador Vasquez’s courtroom. He is being held without bail, as murder defendants are typically not granted bail in Indiana.