WAUKEGAN, Ill. — The man who opened fire at a Fourth of July parade near Chicago in 2022, killing seven people and leaving behind "oceans of grief," will spend the rest of his life behind bars with no possibility of parole, a judge said Thursday.
Robert “Bobby” Crimo III, 24, was a no-show for the sentencing hearing that began Wednesday, and he declined to make a statement to the court, his lawyer said.
"The court finds he’s irrevocably depraved," state Circuit Judge Victoria Rossetti said as she handed down the maximum sentence. "He is beyond any rehabilitation."
Crimo pleaded guilty last month in the mass shooting on July 4, 2022, in Highland Park, about 30 miles outside Chicago, which wounded nearly 50 people in addition to the seven who were killed.
In addition to Crimo, all members of his family also opted against attending court, said a lawyer for Crimo's father.
Liz Turnipseed, who was shot in the pelvis and still struggles with mobility, called Crimo a "coward" for hiding from victims.
"But at the same time, I wasn’t surprised at all," Turnipseed told reporters outside court. "And regardless of whether he was there or not, this was going to happen. I don’t need to see his face. I know what he looks like. I watched the videos with the confession. That was enough to see how cavalier he was about murdering seven people."
Even though the life sentence seemed all but certain coming into Thursday, Highland Park resident Ashely Beasley, who was at the parade, said there was still tension in the courtroom up until Rossetti ruled.
"We just all held our breath just to make sure that he would never, ever be free again," Beasley said. "And now that that's happened, it's like we can exhale knowing that he will not be free."
The seven people Crimo killed were Stephen Straus, 88; Nicolas Toledo-Zaragoza, 78; Eduardo Uvaldo, 69; Katherine Goldstein, 64; Jacquelyn Sundheim, 63; and married couple Kevin McCarthy, 37, and Irina McCarthy, 35. Cooper Roberts, then 8, was shot and paralyzed.
"In the middle of that joy, in the middle of that celebration, 83 shots rang out over 40 seconds. Eighty-three attempts to hurt people, do as much damage as possible. Eighty-three attempts to kill. Eighty-three attempts to reduce light in the world," Lake County State's Attorney Eric Rinehart told the court. "He intended to end the happiness he saw around him. "
Some in the court sobbed and hugged one another as Rinehart summed up the mass trauma.
"I cannot attempt to rein in the pain, oceans of grief, trauma, heartache and loss," he said.
Rossetti appeared to be moments away from adjourning court for the day when a sheriff's deputy approached the bench and delivered her a note that forced an immediate break in proceedings.
With Crimo in a nearby jail, survivors in court believed he might have changed his mind about appearing in court.
But the half-hour delay turned out to be Crimo's claim that some of his belongings in jail had been taken, his lawyers said.
"The offender had a concern about something that was happening in the jail," Rinehart later told reporters. "It was not related to the sentencing hearing. That's all I'm going to say."
Thursday's hearing was a continuation from Wednesday, when more than a dozen witnesses testified, recalling the horrors of that day nearly three years ago.
Erica Weeder and her husband, John Kezdy, survived their physical wounds but were left with permanent emotional scars, she said.
“Because of this mass shooting, this act of terror,” Weeder testified Thursday, “I and my children and entire community now know no one is ever really safe.”
Kezdy, a punk rocker-turned-state prosecutor, was killed a year later in a bicycle accident.
Weeder said she is still nervous about driving and hearing loud noises from construction sites.
“John and I willed ourselves to minimize the impact of shooting on our lives,” she said.
After he was captured, Crimo told police he was trying to avoid shooting children by targeting adults and aiming for the “chest up.”
Life without the possibility of parole is the most severe punishment he faced, as Illinois doesn’t have capital punishment.
Lance Northcutt, an attorney representing the McCarthy family and the slain couple’s orphaned son, said Thursday that there was nothing the judge could do Thursday to bring "justice" to the victims' loved ones.
"Justice would be that little Aidan McCarthy would walk out of a kindergarten today and see his mother and his father waiting there with open arms to greet him," he said after court.
Technically, Crimo was ordered to serve seven consecutive life terms for the seven slayings, in addition to another 50-year sentence, to be served consecutively, for attempted murder and 47 more 50-year terms for attempted murder, to be served concurrently.
"He will not survive his first life sentence, then there would be six more," Rinehart said.
Outside court, Highland Park Mayor Nancy Rotering said she has always been struck by the symbolism of Crimo's attack's unfolding on a day when Americans celebrate freedom.
"Our peer nations can't understand how we put up with this, and I recognize that we, as a community, we're coming together to celebrate freedom," Rotering said. "But how free are you if you're constantly worried that somebody's going to come leave 83 bullets on your community in under a minute? That's not freedom."
There were 503 mass shootings in America last year, and there have been at least 85 so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.
Samira Puskar reported from Waukegan and David K. Li from Los Angeles County.
