Black/African American. On June 23, 2014, Kenneth Alfred Barnett Martin, a 40-year-old man from Chicago, was shot while seated behind the wheel of a car near 69th Street and Paulina Avenue in West Englewood. Wounded in the groin, he tried to drive away but crashed a short distance later and was rushed to Advocate Christ Medical Center, where he underwent surgery.
Four days after the attack, on June 27, 2014, the 40-year-old died of his injuries; authorities noted he was also known as Alfred Barnett or Kenneth Martin.
In the hours after surgeons worked to stabilize him, the 40-year-old man told detectives he knew the shooter by a nickname and, crucially, gave them the man's phone number. Witnesses had already identified the same assailant as the person who walked up to the driver's window and fired into the car. Those statements, paired with surveillance images reviewed by investigators, formed the backbone of an early case file in the days after the shooting.
Detectives moved quickly. They found the suspect, 29-year-old Carl Smith, hiding under a bed at his girlfriend's home and took him into custody. A Cook County judge ordered him held without bond as prosecutors laid out how the 40-year-old victim, from his hospital bed, helped point them to the gunman who had ambushed him.
Years later, a jury convicted Smith of first-degree murder for the killing of the 40-year-old man, and a judge sentenced him to 65 years in prison, a term that included a mandatory enhancement for personally firing a gun that caused death. The Illinois Appellate Court affirmed that sentence in 2023, recounting testimony that placed the shooter at the car window on June 23, 2014, and the victim's fatal outcome on June 27, 2014.
Kenneth Alfred Barnett Martin, a 40-year-old male known in court records and memorial pages as both Alfred Barnett and Kenneth Martin, is remembered among the city's 2014 homicide victims; community memorial sites preserve his name and the date of his death in Chicago.
