Man arrested in Iowa to face same 2016 Chicago murder charges dropped last year

A man accused of selling fake Willie Nelson concert tickets last week in Iowa will be brought to Chicago to face charges in a 2016 murder for the second time.

Natrell Jackson, 20, was arrested Thursday on suspicion that he sold fake tickets to the Willie Nelson and Family concert scheduled for the Five Flags Center the next day, according to police in Dubuque, Iowa.

After they received a report from someone who bought fake tickets from Jackson off a Craigslist advertisement, officers called the number listed on the ad and posed as concertgoers looking to buy tickets, police said. They met Jackson in Dubuque, bought the tickets and took him into custody after he tried to run away.

A Dubuque County judge set his bail at $10,000 on charges of forgery, theft and interference with official acts causing injury, according to Dubuque County Sheriff’s Office records. However, Jackson won’t have a chance to post bond, as he’ll be held in jail on a no-bail arrest warrant out of Cook County.

That warrant, issued by a Cook County judge in January, is in connection with a fatal shooting in the Armour Square neighborhood that Jackson had previously been charged with before prosecutors dropped the charges.

In March 2016, Jackson and 16-year-old Michael Whitehead faced first-degree murder charges in the fatal shooting of a 30-year-old Shari Graham—a mother of three caught in gang crossfire as she sat in the back of a cab. Cook County Judge Peggy Chiampas denied bail for both Jackson and Whitehead at the time.

Graham, of the Gresham neighborhood, was sitting in the cab about 9:45 p.m. on Feb. 26, 2016, near a parking lot for the later-renamed U.S. Cellular Field, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. That’s when gunfire erupted and a bullet went through the back of the cab and struck her in the head, Chicago Police said at the time.

The cab driver drove away to the 4700 block of South State Street and called paramedics. Graham, who wasn’t the intended target of the shooting, died at Stroger Hospital.

More than 1 1/2 years later, the charges against Jackson were dropped in Oct. 2017, Cook County court records show.

The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office has not responded to a request for comment as of Monday evening.

In January, a grand jury indicted Jackson in the same shooting. A judge issued the warrant on eight counts of murder, two counts of attempted murder and three counts of aggravated discharge of a firearm, court records show.

The Cook County Sheriff’s Department will bring Jackson back to Chicago to face the murder charges once his case is completed in Dubuque, a sheriff’s office spokeswoman said.

Jackson is next due in court in Iowa on April 23.