In the early hours of a summer morning in North Philadelphia, a life that had only recently been reclaimed was violently extinguished. George Cortez, a 36-year-old male, was found with multiple gunshot wounds to his chest on the 2300 block of Cleveland Street on June 27, 2016. Rushed to Temple University Hospital, he was pronounced dead later that morning, leaving a family to grapple with a second, more permanent, loss.
Just two months prior, Cortez had walked free from prison, a place
where he had spent four years of his life for a murder he did not commit. In a tragic twist of justice, his own brother, Owen Cortez, had been identified as the actual perpetrator in the 2011 killing of Nafis Murray, leading to George's exoneration and release on April 22, 2016. His newfound freedom, however, was to be tragically short-lived.
In the wake of his death, Philadelphia police began to investigate the chilling possibility that Cortez was the victim of a retaliatory act. Detectives considered that friends of Nafis Murray, the man for whose murder Cortez was wrongly convicted, may have targeted him out of a misplaced quest for vengeance. His mother, Rosetta Cortez, shared this fear, believing her son was killed as retribution for the crime he was ultimately cleared of.
Despite the strong suspicions of a revenge motive, the investigation into George Cortez's murder proved to be a difficult one. At the time of the initial reports, police had not identified any suspects in his shooting. The neighborhood, it was believed, held the answers, with law enforcement appealing to the public for any information that could lead to an arrest. The case, however, went cold, and with no publicly announced arrests or suspects in the years that followed, the story of George Cortez became a somber tale of a man who was failed by the justice system and then brutally murdered before he had a chance to truly reclaim his life.
