The Chicago Massacre: The Johnson Brothers Who ʙᴜʀɴᴇᴅ 11 Gang Members for a Stolen Jacket | HO!!

Thirty years have passed since a South Side building went up in flames on a bitter Valentine’s night in 1994, leaving 11 young people dead and a neighborhood drowning in grief, rage, and disbelief. In the decades that followed, Chicago has endured countless acts of violence, but few have imprinted themselves on the city’s collective memory with the same horrifying clarity as what became known—quietly, grimly—as The Ashland Massacre.

It was a crime so shocking, so deliberate, so methodical, that even hardened investigators struggled to understand it. Two brothers—Marcus and Terrell Johnson—locked the exits of an abandoned building, poured 25 gallons of gasoline around its perimeter, and lit it on fire while more than a dozen members of a neighborhood street crew were inside. The motive: a leather jacket stolen during a dice game.

The fire burned for hours. Eleven people died. Only one survived.

The story sounded too senseless to believe. But as the investigation unfolded, it became clear that the massacre wasn’t just about a jacket. It was about a code, a neighborhood, a collapsing social order, and the pressures of a community abandoned by institutions long before Marcus Johnson lit his match.

Today, the empty lot at 6743 South Ashland Avenue holds no marker. No plaque. No memorial. Just weeds pushing through cracked concrete. Children ride bikes over the ground where bodies once lay. The city moved on.

But for those who lived through it—for the families, investigators, and the lone survivor—the fire never went out.

This is the true story of how a stolen jacket ignited one of Chicago’s deadliest crimes of the 1990s.

I. A Neighborhood on Edge

In early 1994, West Englewood carried the weight of decades of neglect. A once-thriving working-class community had become a patchwork of abandoned homes, failing schools, shuttered businesses, and survival-mode families trying to hold together what little stability remained.

The city was dismantling its public housing high-rises—Cabrini-Green, Robert Taylor Homes, Henry Horner—and thousands of displaced residents were scattered across the South Side. Old gang structures splintered into dozens of unaffiliated “crews,” each controlling a few blocks, a corner, a vacant house. The old corporate hierarchies were gone, replaced by decentralized pockets of teenage leadership, improvised rules, and explosive egos.

“Violence wasn’t about money anymore,” former CPD detective Raymond Walsh says today. “It was about reputation. Respect. The fear of looking weak.”

Walsh spent 19 years investigating South Side homicides. He understood the neighborhood’s unspoken laws—the same ones that shaped Marcus and Terrell Johnson’s lives. He’d later call the Ashland Massacre “the most calculated act of retaliatory violence I ever investigated.”

But in February 1994, he didn’t know the Johnson brothers’ names. Nobody did. Not yet.

II. The Man Who Walked Away

Marcus Johnson, 27, didn’t look like a future mass murderer.

He worked at Big Mike’s Auto Repair, fixing transmissions for nine dollars an hour, paid under the table. He showed up early, stayed late, and kept to himself. His boss, a grizzled mechanic named Mike Terelli, once described him as “quiet, focused… the kind of guy who could rebuild an engine blindfolded.”

He wasn’t married. No kids. Lived alone in a basement apartment on South Hermitage. His mother had died of breast cancer in 1989. His father, James Johnson, had been shot and killed in a random crossfire on 69th and Halsted in 1987, dying on the hot pavement while bystanders took pictures instead of helping.

Marcus never forgot that.

The only thing he inherited from his father was a brown leather Army jacket, worn during the Korean War. The jacket was old—cracked around the seams, torn on the inside—but it was the last piece of a man who’d raised Marcus with a strict code:

Never let anyone disrespect you.
Never walk away looking weak.
Never forget where you came from.

When Ray Ray and the Ashland crew stole that jacket, they stole more than leather. They stole Marcus’s last tether to his father.

And in Marcus’s world, that was a line you didn’t cross.

III. The Dice Game That Lit a Fuse

On January 28, 1994, the temperature dropped to eight degrees. Ice coated the windows of abandoned storefronts, and the wind carried the metallic smell of CTA bus exhaust.

Around 11:30 p.m., Marcus followed his younger brother Terrell into the basement of a vacant building used as an unofficial clubhouse by the Ashland crew—a loose group of teenagers and twenty-somethings who hung out together out of boredom, camaraderie, and the safety of numbers.

The basement was cramped. A space heater glowed orange in the corner. Smoke hung thick near the ceiling. Liquor bottles littered the floor.

Ray Ray Thomas—22, charismatic, loud, the crew’s unofficial leader—was losing badly at dice. Marcus was winning. And then came the moment no one present would ever forget.

Accusations of cheating.
A joke about Marcus’s father.
A shove that didn’t escalate.

And then Ray Ray, emboldened by liquor and the eyes of his crew, grabbed Marcus’s jacket off his shoulders and held it up like a trophy.

“Payment for disrespect,” he said.

Laughter. Acrid smoke. A moment that should have passed.

But Marcus didn’t shout. Didn’t reach for him. Didn’t swing. He simply stared at Ray Ray as if memorizing the shape of his face.

Then he walked out into the eight-degree night, his breath fogging in front of him.

Terrell followed.

“Marcus didn’t even argue,” one crew member later told detectives. “He just left. That’s how we knew something bad was coming. Quiet men are the scary ones.”

Three blocks away, Marcus finally spoke.

“Not tonight,” he said.
“But we’re getting it back.”

Ray Ray had mistaken silence for weakness.

He didn’t understand that Marcus Johnson wasn’t done.

He was planning.

IV. Preparation for Murder

The week after the dice game, Marcus behaved like a man splitting himself in two. At work, he rebuilt alternators and changed oil like always. But his mind drifted. His boss noticed.

“You’ve been staring at that wrench for five minutes,” Terelli told him. “Whatever you’re thinking about… think twice.”

Marcus said nothing.

At home, he spread maps across his kitchen table. Marked exits. Marked fire station distances. Watched the Ashland building for days—counting who went in and out, and when.

He bought chains and padlocks at two different hardware stores. Paid cash. Bought five red gasoline cans. Borrowed a cousin’s Buick “to move some things.”

This was not impulsive anger.

It was logistics.

It was engineering.

It was murder drafted like a blueprint.

Meanwhile, Terrell—23, stocky, volatile, brimming with loyalty—struggled. He told his girlfriend Chenise, who begged him to stay out of it.

“You got a choice,” she told him.

But Terrell didn’t think he did. Marcus had raised him after their father died. Loyalty was thicker than the future he barely believed in.

“If Marcus is doing this,” he said, “I’m with him.”

And Marcus was doing it.

No doubt.
No hesitation.
No turning back.

V. Valentine’s Night
**Monday, February 14, 1994

10:47 p.m.
Temperature: 19 degrees**

The Johnson brothers sat in the Buick half a block from the abandoned building. Music pulsed from inside—bass thumping through boarded windows.

Marcus’s eyes were empty. Terrell’s were wet with fear.

“You can walk away,” Marcus told him.

“So can you,” Terrell said.

But neither moved.

At 10:58, they stepped out of the Buick and retrieved the chains.

Marcus wrapped the front door, looping heavy steel links through the handle and around a corroded support beam. Terrell did the same at the back.

Both exits sealed.

Only then did they begin pouring gasoline.

Twenty-five gallons.
A perimeter of death.
A ring that would trap everyone inside.

At 11:23 p.m., they met in front of the building. Marcus struck a single match.

A tiny flame.
A moment of decision.
A lifetime of consequences.

He dropped it.

The ignition was instant—gasoline blossoming into a wall of orange. Flames climbed the siding like a living thing, feeding on oxygen, wood, trash, old wiring.

Inside, the first scream came 45 seconds later.

Then another.

Then many.

VI. Trapped

Upstairs, Kesha Wallace, 18 and three months pregnant, had been lying on an old mattress. She made it to a second-floor window, climbed onto the ledge, stared at the 25-foot drop—and jumped.

Her body hit the pavement with a terrible, final sound.

Downstairs, Ray Ray realized instantly what was happening. As smoke thickened the basement, he understood who had done this.

“Marcus,” he rasped. “Marcus did this.”

He tried to coordinate escape attempts, but both doors were sealed. Smoke descended. Flames rose. Drywall collapsed.

On the third floor, a former college student named Antoine Mercer reached an open window and shouted for help.

“Call the fire department! Please! We’re dying!”

Marcus stood across the street watching him burn.

He did not call for help.

VII. Collapse

At 11:52 p.m., the building gave way. Floors dropped into one another like dying lungs collapsing inward. The basement became a tomb of burning debris.

The screaming stopped.

“This wasn’t rage,” Detective Walsh said later. “This was execution.”

VIII. The Survivor

Only one person made it out alive.

Darnell Hayes, 19, jumped from a second-floor window and shattered both legs. The bones tore through the skin; he lay in the alley screaming until his voice gave out.

He survived six surgeries, months in the hospital, and a lifetime of pain.

When he regained consciousness, he muttered only two names:

“Marcus. Terrell.”

It was enough.

IX. The Investigation

By 9 a.m. the next morning, the burned structure was a skeletal ruin. Fire investigators found gasoline trails, melted padlocks, chains fused into warped metal.

“This wasn’t negligence. This was murder,” fire investigator Susan Chen concluded.

Detectives canvassed the neighborhood. Everyone knew the jacket story. Everyone knew Marcus hadn’t forgotten.

Within hours, his name surfaced.

By mid-afternoon, CPD surrounded Dorothy Johnson’s apartment. Marcus and Terrell sat at the kitchen table, unarmed, waiting.

“Did you have anything to do with that fire?” Dorothy asked her grandson.

“Yes, ma’am,” Marcus said.

She cried.

“You burned 11 people alive over a jacket?”

“They disrespected Dad,” Marcus said.

“No,” she told him. “They disrespected a coat. And you destroyed your life.”

Marcus and Terrell surrendered without resistance.

X. The Trial

The trial began in September 1994. Prosecutors filed 43 counts of murder and aggravated arson.

The defense attempted a “cultural insanity” argument—claiming the brothers were shaped by an environment where failing to retaliate could be deadly. Prosecutors dismantled it in hours.

“You purchased chains.
You bought gasoline.
You mapped escape routes.
You locked the doors.
You lit the match,” the prosecutor said.
“That’s not insanity.
That’s premeditation.”

The jury deliberated 19 hours over three days.

Both brothers were found guilty on all counts.

Both received life without parole.

Marcus didn’t react. Terrell wept.

XI. Life After Death
Marcus in Prison

Marcus Johnson spent three decades at Menard Correctional Center. Inmates described him as “disciplined,” “quiet,” “controlled.” He worked in the library, helping others study for GED exams.

Guards said he was “one of the most orderly inmates we ever had.”

His grandmother visited monthly until her health failed. She died in 2012. Marcus was not allowed to attend her funeral.

He died in 2024 of a heart attack at age 57. His final words to the prison chaplain:

“Tell Terrell I’m sorry.
Tell him it wasn’t worth it.”

Terrell in Prison

Terrell did not adapt to prison life. He racked up disciplinary infractions, suffered depression, PTSD, extended segregation. He spoke publicly only once, in 2019:

“Every night I see their faces.
Every night I hear them screaming.
Marcus told me it’d be worth it.
It wasn’t.”

His girlfriend Chenise moved to Atlanta, married, and never looked back.

The Survivors’ Families

The families of the 11 dead tried to rebuild, but grief doesn’t evaporate—it calcifies.

Kesha Wallace’s mother, devastated by losing her daughter and unborn grandchild, died in 2003.

Antoine Mercer’s father left Chicago and never spoke about the fire again.

Jerome Little’s mother turned his bedroom into a shrine and uses it today to show at-risk youth “what violence really destroys.”

Lashonda Price’s family created a nursing scholarship in her name that has helped 37 young women pursue medical careers.

Grief found ways to carve meaning.
But it never found justice.

The Lone Survivor

Today, Darnell Hayes walks with a cane. He works part-time at a community center.

“I survived the fire,” he says. “But I didn’t survive what it did to my head.”

XII. The Neighborhood After the Flames

West Englewood didn’t transform after the massacre. Not really.

Police patrols briefly increased. Politicians made promises. Programs were launched—and then defunded. Crime dipped, rose, dipped again.

The building was demolished in 1995. The lot remains empty.

On cold February nights, neighbors say they sometimes smell smoke, though the scent is only memory.

The code that fueled the massacre—never let anyone disrespect you—still lingers in pockets of the South Side. Because the conditions that created it remain.

Poverty.
Isolation.
Abandonment.
Broken trust in institutions.
Young men learning that fear substitutes for protection.

“People think Marcus and Terrell were monsters,” Detective Walsh says. “But they were raised in a world that taught them those rules. A world that failed them long before they failed everyone else.”

XIII. The Meaning of a Match

The horror of the Ashland Massacre is not that it happened over a jacket.

It’s that it happened over what the jacket represented:

Honor
Masculinity
Fear
Power
A father’s legacy
A neighborhood’s code
A young man’s identity
A refusal to be humiliated
A desperation to survive in a world where institutions didn’t protect you that way

Add gasoline.
Add fire.
Add 30 years of systemic failure.

And a match becomes a weapon.

XIV. Was It Worth It?

Before his death, Marcus Johnson wanted one message passed on:

“It wasn’t worth it.”

But that answer comes too late for the 11 young people who lost their lives, the unborn child who never drew breath, the families broken, the neighborhood wounded, and the brother who will die behind bars.

The Ashland Massacre remains a story without heroes. Only victims—on every side.

The victims inside the building.

The families left behind.

Marcus and Terrell themselves—shaped by a code they didn’t invent, living in circumstances they didn’t choose.

Violence begets violence.

Disrespect begets retaliation.

Retaliation breeds destruction.

And destruction breeds another generation who believes the same lies.

The empty lot on South Ashland Avenue has no marker, no flowers, no memorial.

But the question the massacre forces us to confront remains burned into Chicago’s history:

When does honor become horror?

When does respect become murder?

And how many more lives will be lost before the cycle finally ends?

Until those questions are answered, the ashes of 1994 will never truly cool.