A man was shot on the near North Side Monday afternoon about two years after he was released from a 100-year prison sentence for his part in the April 2014 killing of 14-year old Endia Martin, according to police sources.
Late Monday afternoon, Near North (18th) District police officers were dispatched to find Donnell Flora on the 900 block of North Dearborn Street, where he said he he had been shot near the intersection of Clark and Division Streets, according to police sources. Flora uses a wheelchair to get around after a 2010 shooting left him paralyzed from the waist down.
A police report describes Flora giving “conflicting statements” to police and paramedics: he allegedly told officers that someone he didn’t know came up to him, demanded an item he didn’t have and then shot him. But he told paramedics someone had been attempting to rob him and shot him.
He was taken in good condition to Northwestern Hospital, police said. Detectives were looking into the possibility Flora mistakenly shot himself, according to preliminary case paperwork.
No one was in custody in the shooting, police said.
Flora, 36, was found guilty of murder and attempted murder in 2016 after giving his niece, who was also 14, a .38 Special to confront a onetime friend over a feud about a boy. Endia Martin was running back inside her cousin’s home in the Back of the Yards neighborhood when she was fatally shot.
At the time, Judge Thaddeus Wilson ripped Flora saying, “There is no excuse or rationalization for giving a child a gun to take to a ridiculous fight about a boy — none.”
Flora took a bus to meet his niece after she had requested a gun to use in a fight, prosecutors said, and handed her the loaded handgun near the scene of the shooting.
The teen was sentenced in 2018 to up to two more years behind bars, having already served four in the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center.
A panel of appellate court judges in 2020 reversed Flora’s conviction and recommended a new trial, state court records show. The panel found that prosecutors’ statements and the judge’s rulings on objections to those statements led the jury to misunderstand what the requirements were to find him legally responsible for his niece’s actions.
After a second trial, court records show Flora in March 2021 pleaded guilty to a charge of conspiracy to commit first degree murder and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.
Flora was released from the Robinson Correctional Center in August 2023, state prison records show.
Tribune reporter Sophie Levenson contributed to this story