Sergio Zaragoza, 28, a man from Chicago, was shot on the afternoon of September 11, 2016 in the Hermosa neighborhood after an argument on the 1600 block of North Karlov Avenue turned physical. Police and the Cook County medical examiner said a male approached during the scuffle, produced a gun and fired once into Zaragoza's chest. He was rushed to Mount Sinai Hospital and pronounced dead at 3:47 p.m.
Authorities noted the incident might have been domestic in nature, and that Zaragoza lived a block north of where the shooting occurred.
Months later, on January 13, 2017, Chicago police announced charges against Tony T. Browley, then 40, in connection with the killing. A judge ordered him held without bond. The charging statement echoed the early account of the confrontation, alleging that Browley walked up during the fight and fired the fatal shot.
Court records show that Browley was later tried before a judge and found guilty of second-degree murder. The trial court sentenced him to 11 years in prison, and in 2021 the Illinois Appellate Court affirmed the conviction and sentence, recounting witness testimony that Zaragoza was unarmed when he was shot and that the shooting followed a brief porch-side altercation.
In the days that followed, memorial notices marked Zaragoza's death and listed services in Berwyn and Chicago, while community records of gun-violence victims preserved his name and date. Those remembrances underscored the suddenness with which an everyday argument on a late-summer Sunday became a fatal encounter.
