Argument Over Cheese Leads to Self-Defense Shooting

The Cook County State Attorney’s office has rejected charges against man who fatally shot two others in a fight stemming from a piece of cheese, citing self-defense and insufficient evidence to the contrary. 

According to the Chicago Sun-Times, neither the armed citizen nor the two men he shot were involved in the initial dispute, which took place at a restaurant called Momty’s Grill in the south Chicago neighborhood of Roseland last week. 

The shooting was sparked by an argument over what kind of cheese was being put on a customer’s sandwich at Momty’s Grill, 9 E. 111th St., on Monday afternoon, according to a Chicago police report.

An employee became upset with the customer, who was yelling at her about the cheese, the Chicago police report said. The woman called her son to the restaurant. 

After the son came, a group of men also entered the restaurant, and two of them hit the son in the face, according to the report. The son ran out of the restaurant, chased by the men.

Shots rang out, and responding officers found two men, Dexter Williams and Monte Potts, with multiple gunshot wounds, the report said.

The police report said the son “was responsible for” at least one of the deaths. He checked himself into a Roseland hospital in good condition. He was placed into police custody, but an assistant state’s attorney declined to pursue charges, saying he acted in self-defense, the police report states.

This entire situation is bizarre, and the escalation into physical violence was completely unnecessary, but based on the Sun-Times report it does sound like the armed citizen was justified in using lethal force to protect himself. He wasn’t the one who escalated a verbal dispute into violence, and after he was punched in the face he attempted to retreat, even though at that point he would arguably have been justified in using his firearm to defend himself. 

The two men who were shot had the opportunity to de-escalate the situation as well, but instead chose to pursue the man out the restaurant and down the street. I’d say it’s reasonable for the gun owner, who at that point had already been physically assaulted, to believe that he was at risk of injury or death from his assailants when they ran after him. 

In a statement, the Cook County State Attorney’s office said that after “a thorough review, the evidence was insufficient to meet the burden of proof required to file criminal charges at this time,” but added that the office is “committed to reviewing any additional information related to this matter that is brought to us.”

Unless there’s some surveillance footage or physical evidence showing that the armed citizen was no longer facing a threat to life and limb when he shot his attackers, I can’t imagine that prosecutors are going to reverse course, especially with how quickly the office determined that charges weren’t appropriate. 

The sad thing is that this entire incident was the result of a series of bad decisions. All of this could have been avoided if the customer had simply cancelled her order and walked away after not getting what she wanted. I’m not sure what she thought her son could do to rectify the situation, or why Williams and Potts decided to physically assault him when they showed up, but there’s no good reason why a dispute over cheese needed to escalate into punches being thrown. Once that needless escalation happened, though, the armed citizen had every right to protect himself from further harm, and it was the pair’s decision to pursue him that led to their deaths.