'Daddy why? Don’t shoot me.' New details released of Joliet shooting rampage that killed 8
A child’s toy car sits outside home where family was shot to death in Joliet in January.
Joliet police.
On a frigid afternoon this past winter, a doorbell camera facing a snow-covered Joliet street captured Romeo Nance grasping a stolen assault rifle as he stepped inside a family home.
“Hi, Dad,” a child was heard saying before Nance allegedly killed five relatives inside the home in the 2200 block of West Acres Road on Jan. 21.
“Daddy why? Don’t shoot me,” the child cried out as his father opened fire, according to Joliet police reports obtained through a public records request.
Minutes earlier, Nance had gunned down his own mother and an uncle in another home on the same block, the records show. The child’s mother, Kyleigh Cleveland-Singleton, was allegedly present and stuck around as Nance headed for the second home.
By the time police arrived on the block, the boy was gone and an Amber Alert was issued before he was found safe.
Cleveland-Singleton has since been charged with a felony count of obstruction of justice, but the records indicate that she had a deeper involvement in the case than first thought and remained in close contact with Nance when he went on the run.
On the morning of the deadly rampage, Nance had a contentious text message exchange with his mother, Tameaka Nance, after she apparently told him she was claiming her grandson in her tax filing and adding the boy to her public aid account.
“This is absolutely ridiculous,” he wrote. “How are [you] gonna act like this?”
After the seven killings on West Acres Road, police say Romeo Nance killed a man and wounded another in separate attacks nearby that officials have described as random.
With the cops on his trail, Romeo Nance began driving his Toyota Camry toward the Mexican border, records show, but not before he bought a cellphone from a Joliet Walmart to stay in touch with Cleveland-Singleton.
While on the lam, Romeo Nance deleted a social media account and used the phone to frantically search Google, looking for news about the shootings and checking whether he needed a passport to enter Mexico.
He also appeared worried that his car could be flagged by license plate readers used by police, searching repeatedly about the technology.
After Romeo Nance had been previously arrested for allegedly firing a gun during a traffic dispute, he took a keen interest in the police computer that pinged the plates of passing cars and provided the criminal history of the registered owners.
When the computer flashed an alert about one such driver, Romeo Nance appeared stunned. “No wonder y’all know how to get up on a motherf------ real quick,” he said on camera.
A day after the shootings in January, law enforcement officials tracked the Camry down in Natalia, Texas, about 115 miles from the border with Mexico. By then, Romeo Nance had affixed stolen Texas plates to the car, records show.
The fugitive ran from the stop and fatally shot himself, according to the records.
Inside the Camry, officials found a pistol described as a “ghost gun,” an AR-15 that had been reported stolen from Indiana in 2003 and ammunition, records show. There were also two cellphones, including the one he used to communicate with Cleveland-Singleton.
Video from doorbell cameras and a remote camera inside the home at 2225 West Acres show Cleveland-Singleton may have been inside the house as Romeo Nance gunned down his mother and uncle.
Cleveland-Singleton went to her car, a GMC Acadia that she had bought the day before, and drove across the street to 2212 West Acres as Nance walked over and shot five other family members inside, according to the records.
Cleveland-Singleton and Romeo Nance exchanged four separate phone calls over a messaging app during the 20 minutes or so the shootings lasted, the records state. Romeo Nance also sent her $1,346 using a banking app that day.
Police appeared skeptical of Cleveland-Singleton from the moment they arrived at a Plainfield home where her mother and younger siblings lived — and where she had arrived with her son soon after the shootings.
Wearing sweats, Cleveland-Singleton speaks softly and says little as police and her mother convince her to go to the station, ostensibly to ask questions but also to remove them from any possible danger posed by Nance and to offer counseling to her son, according to the records and video taken by police.
“It’s some nasty stuff we’re dealing with. I am worried you saw some kind of nasty stuff,” one officer tells Cleveland-Singleton and her mother. “We’re obviously concerned with everybody else’s welfare. Obviously, if he can do something like that.”
Cleveland-Singleton's mother replies, “Obviously we want to do whatever we can on our part.”
An investigator asks Cleveland-Singleton when she last saw Romeo Nance, and she replies that she had seen him the previous day at a gym. A detective asks her for Nance’s phone number.
“I don’t even … we don’t communicate like that,” she said. “We communicate online.”
Stepping outside the house, the detective described the interaction with Cleveland-Singleton to another officer on his cellphone.
“We didn’t search the house, but they’re scared of [Nance], too, at least that’s how they’re portraying it,” he says.
Reporting that Cleveland-Singleton said she did not have a phone number for Romeo Nance, he scoffs before requesting a tow truck to haul the Acadia to the police station.
“We asked her, ‘Where’s Romeo?’ and she said, ‘I have no idea,’” the officer reports.
Another video shows Cleveland-Singleton at the police station some 40 hours later, seated in an interrogation room with a small mattress and a sheet of plastic on the floor.
"What's going on?" she asks a detective after she makes a trip to brush her teeth.
"You're under arrest, OK, and we're trying to figure out charges for you," an officer replies.
"Under arrest for what?" she asks, leaning her head against her hand as she slumps in her seat.
"Uh, for some of the incidents that happened on West Acres," he replied.
When the detective returns to the locked room a few minutes later with a phone for Cleveland-Singleton, she is wiping tears from her eyes.
Cellphone data purportedly shows she and Romeo Nance were together at the Walmart where he purchased his new cellphone, and that the pair corresponded on messaging apps and had several long phone conversations as he was making his way to Texas after the killings.
Their final call lasted 18 minutes, as Romeo Nance would have been passing through Arkansas, just hours before he killed himself as local police and U.S. marshals closed in on him at a Texas gas station.
Cleveland-Singleton's attorney, Chuck Bretz, told the Sun-Times she "is presumed to be innocent as to the charges against her, and I fully expect that time will bear that out."
"She is a also a victim in this matter and has been thoroughly traumatized by what transpired," Bretz added.