WAUKEGAN — Robert Crimo III, the man accused of carrying out a mass shooting in Highland Park in 2022 that left seven people dead and prompted the passage of a ban on assault-style weapons and high-capacity magazines in Illinois, pleaded guilty Monday to all charges stemming from that shooting.
Crimo’s trial on 69 counts of murder and attempted murder, was set to begin Monday in a Lake County courtroom. But before the start of opening arguments in what was scheduled to be a three-week trial, his attorneys informed Judge Victoria Rossetti that he wanted to change his plea.
His mother, Denise Pesina, told Capitol News Illinois she was not expecting her son to plead guilty.
“Well, my son is innocent,” she said. “My son will be coming home. I’m not quite sure why this happened.”
Ashbey Beasley, who attended the July 4 parade with her son where the shooting took place, said she was relieved at the outcome.
“We are not the first community to go through this, and we are not the last,” she told reporters outside the courtroom.
Crimo was accused of firing into a crowd of people from a rooftop in Highland Park during the city’s annual Independence Day parade using a semiautomatic rifle equipped with three 30-round magazines. He reportedly fired approximately 80 shots in about two minutes, killing seven people while injuring dozens more.
Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart said afterward that Crimo’s guilty plea was not part of any plea bargaining or negotiation for a lighter sentence.
“He made a free decision to plead guilty to every count that was about to be presented to a jury,” Rinehart said in a statement. “He received nothing in exchange. We were one thousand percent ready for trial and to prove him guilty.”
His sentencing hearing will be April 23. He faces seven consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.
The Highland Park shooting occurred just a few weeks after a May 24 mass shooting at a grade school in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 children and two adults were killed, as well as a May 14 shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, where 10 people were killed. Similar rifles were used in both of those shootings as well.
Those shootings prompted Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, who was running for reelection at the time, to call for bans on assault weapons and large-capacity magazines at both the state and national levels.
State lawmakers took up the issue during a lame duck session the following January and passed what is now called the Protect Illinois Communities Act.
It prohibits the purchase, sale, transfer or ownership of hundreds of types of firearms that it classifies as “assault weapons,” although people who owned such guns before the law’s enactment are allowed to keep them if they obtain a special endorsement on their Firearm Owner’s Identification card.
It also bans large-capacity magazines and various kinds of firearm attachments, including those that increase the rate of fire of a semiautomatic weapon to simulate the rapid fire of a fully automatic weapon.
“Today’s guilty plea is welcome news for weary hearts in the Highland Park community,” state Rep. Bob Morgan, D-Deerfield, the lead House sponsor of the assault weapons ban, said in a statement Monday. “This is a small step toward justice following the July 4, 2022, mass shooting as we continue to recover and heal.”
Gun rights advocates quickly filed numerous challenges to the ban in federal court arguing the law violated the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms.
In April 2023, U.S. District Judge Stephen McGlynn, of the Southern District of Illinois in East St. Louis, granted a temporary restraining order to block enforcement of the law, but in separate cases, two other federal judges in Chicago declined to do the same.
The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed McGlynn’s decision and allowed the law to remain in effect while the court challenges proceeded. And in July 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review those decisions, sending all of the cases back to the trial courts for full proceedings.
After a weeklong trial in East St. Louis in September, McGlynn again sided with gun rights advocacy groups and issued a ruling declaring the law unconstitutional. But that decision was quickly put on hold by the 7th Circuit, which noted the two other cases in Chicago courts have not yet gone to trial.
Many observers expect the cases will eventually reach the U.S. Supreme Court. Illinois is one of 10 states, along with Washington, D.C., that have enacted some level of ban on assault weapons.
Ashley Soriano is a graduate student in journalism with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, and a Fellow in its Medill Illinois News Bureau working in partnership with Capitol News Illinois.
CNI reporters Hannah Meisel and Ben Szalinski contributed to this story.
Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
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