Antwone Price had just moved into a new house in the south suburbs, and he was talking about finally marrying the woman he’d been with for several years — the woman with whom he shared a baby girl.
But Price, a clerk at the Daley Center, had nagging worries — that someone might try to hurt his family, Price’s grandmother told the Chicago Sun-Times Thursday, a day after Price and another man were found dead and tied up in a car on the South Side. Investigators found Price, 30, in the trunk, while the other man was found in the back seat, a source said.
“He would call me twice a day (from) work,” said Myrtis Price, the grandmother and the woman who raised Antwone Price. “If I didn’t answer the phone, he would panic because he thought someone had done something to me.”
Myrtis Price — who lost her son, Antwone Price’s father, to gun violence more than a decade ago — said she knew the other man found in the car in the 7100 block of South Oakley only by his nickname. She said he was one of her grandson’s friends.
Autopsies were scheduled for Thursday morning, according to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office, which has not officially identified either man.
Officers conducting a well-being check in the 7100 block of South Oakley made the gruesome discovery, finding the two men in a Chevrolet Camaro about 3:20 p.m. Wednesday, police said. At least one of the men had his hands bound, authorities said. Myrtis Price said the car belonged to her grandson.
A cause of death has yet to be determined, due partly to the location of the bodies in the car and the amount of blood that was discovered, authorities said. The men possibly had been shot, authorities said.
Myrtis Price said she’s been shown a picture of her grandson bound and beaten.
“I didn’t see his face,” Price said. “All I saw was the shoulders down to the legs. He didn’t have nothing but his underclothes.”
Price said she knew her son had “enemies,” and at one point, her grandson told her cryptically, “If I don’t do what they want me to do, they will kill you, Grandma,” she said.
But her grandson never named the enemies. Nor did he say why, specifically, anyone would want to hurt the Price family, she said.
In addition to his work at the Daley Center, Price also had a side career promoting rap music shows, which sometimes required him to travel out of town, the grandmother said.
“He was a working man — he worked seven days a week,” Myrtis Price said.
Price said she’d recently asked her grandson why he was waiting to get married.
“He said he wanted to have a nice wedding,” Price said.
Price said her grandson was raised in the city, attended Leo Catholic High School and earned a degree in criminal justice from Quincy University in Quincy, Ill.