On a warm July night in 2021, Thomas Hill, a 33-year-old male from Chicago, Illinois, left a birthday party at the Up Your Alley entertainment venue in Schererville, Indiana, getting into a 2004 GMC van with a woman he knew as the lanes closed around midnight. Friends knew him by the nickname “3 Lil Thomas” and remembered him as funny and entrepreneurial, someone who was said to run his own business and whose life revolved around family and work.
The short drive north toward home along Indianapolis Boulevard should have been routine, a quiet ride back to the expressway after an evening of celebration.
Instead, the trip turned into an ambush. Surveillance footage later showed a black Dodge Caravan, a stolen Jeep Grand Cherokee, and a gray Chrysler Town & Country pulling out of the parking lot around the same time Hill’s van left the party. At first, those vehicles were ahead of him; by the time the caravan of cars reached the Highland–Hammond border, cameras captured the order reversed, with Hill’s van out front and the other three vehicles falling in line behind. Somewhere near 175th Street and Indianapolis Boulevard, as the van headed back toward the I-80/94 interchange, gunfire erupted. According to police, at least 30 rounds from multiple weapons tore into the van as it moved along the road, turning the vehicle into a rolling trap from which there was no escape.
The van, riddled with bullets, careened off course. Around 12:15 a.m., first responders were dispatched to the GoLo gas station at 7306 Indianapolis Boulevard in Hammond for a crash involving gunshot victims. They found the GMC van smashed into poles and decorative lighting in the station lot. Inside, Hill sat unresponsive in the driver’s seat, shot in the head and struck multiple times elsewhere; the woman beside him was also seriously wounded. Both were rushed to area hospitals, and Hill was later pronounced dead at Munster Community Hospital, his death ruled a homicide, while his passenger was reported in serious but stable condition.
In the immediate aftermath, investigators faced a sprawling and chaotic crime scene. One scene centered on the crashed van at the gas station; another stretched back to the underpass near the I-80/94 corridor, where officers recovered numerous shell casings scattered along Indianapolis Boulevard. Indianapolis Boulevard was shut down while detectives tried to piece together what had happened, and early statements from police floated the possibility that the attack might have grown out of a road-rage confrontation on the highway. They also pursued a potential link to a vehicle discovered in Illinois, suggesting early on that the shooters might have crossed state lines in their escape. For months, despite the volume of evidence and surveillance footage, the case edged toward dormancy, with no immediate arrests and the motive still murky.
The turning point came more than a year later, after violence erupted again in Hammond. On September 25, 2022, a shooting at the Serenity Lounge on Kennedy Avenue left Brian Leonard, 29, of Chicago, dead and three others wounded during another birthday party. Prosecutors later alleged that Leonard was aligned with the Black Disciples, and that some of those involved in the Serenity Lounge shooting were tied to the earlier killing of Hill. From that case, investigators recovered a cellphone belonging to Joseph Smith, and when digital forensics specialists extracted its contents, they found a group chat that appeared to show people plotting on the night Hill was killed. One of the messages reportedly included a screenshot of the Up Your Alley birthday party flyer, and records indicated that the Jeep seen near Hill’s van was believed to carry Damonte “MG Montae” Jones, the person prosecutors say was closest to the van when the shots were fired. Authorities also traced the black Caravan to a multi-unit building on South Morgan Street in Chicago, where they located another of the suspect vehicles, and North Chicago police later recovered an AK-47 in November 2021 that ballistics linked to the attack on Hill’s van.
As detectives followed these threads, a broader narrative emerged: according to charging documents, Hill’s death was no random highway clash but part of a bitter feud between the Gangster Disciples and the Black Disciples, with the birthday party at Up Your Alley serving as a flashpoint. On November 20, 2024, authorities charged Damonte “MG Montae” Jones, then 24 and from Chicago, with murder and attempted murder in connection with the road shooting that killed Hill and wounded his passenger. He was extradited from Cook County to face the Lake County charges, with court records noting his next scheduled appearance that December and describing the slaying as rooted in the two gangs’ rivalry.
Not long afterward, a second suspect was brought into the case. In December 2024, reports based on a Chicago Tribune account stated that Joseph O. Smith, 32, of Glenwood, Illinois, had been charged with murder and attempted murder in Hill’s killing and was in custody as Jones’s co-defendant. The same reporting recounted that Hill had been shot five times in the attack on Indianapolis Boulevard near the I-80/94 interchange and reiterated that his female companion had survived her injuries. Taken together with the group-chat evidence recovered from Smith’s phone, prosecutors alleged that Hill’s final drive from the birthday party had been monitored and coordinated rather than encountered by chance.
While Jones and Smith awaited proceedings in Lake County, the name Damonte S. Crawford—also known as Damonte S. Jones—surfaced in yet another deadly case. In January 2025, Gary police and the Lake County Prosecutor’s Homicide Task Force executed a SWAT raid on a home in Hammond, arresting Crawford/Jones in connection with a separate shooting in Gary that killed Darian Hilson and injured others; he was charged there with murder, multiple counts of attempted murder, and firearm enhancements. Those allegations concern a different incident, but they help explain why, by early 2025, the primary suspect named in Hill’s case was being held on a constellation of serious charges across more than one homicide investigation.
Through all of this, Hill’s story continues to be preserved in online memorials, where loved ones have lit candles on gun-violence remembrance sites and described a sociable, funny person who ran his own business and whose life was cut short on a night that should have ended with nothing more dramatic than a late drive home. As of the most recent reporting, public accounts focus on the arrests and charging documents for Jones and Smith; there have not yet been widely reported trial outcomes or convictions in the killing of Thomas Hill, leaving his family and community waiting for a courtroom resolution to match the narrative investigators have assembled from video, ballistics, and digital traces.
