A person responsible for two vicious murders in a Chicago suburb more than a decade ago has again been charged in Brown County Circuit Court for a murder at a Mt. Sterling prison facility.
Brown County State’s Attorney Michael Hill has charged 36-year old Joshua R. Miner, a now-former prisoner at Western Illinois Correctional Center, with two counts of first-degree murder.
ABC-7 in Chicago reports that 44-year old Andrew Ortega of Chicago was found dead in his jail cell that he shared with Miner at Western on the morning of August 26, 2024. Brown County sheriff and coroner Justin Oliver would later determine Ortega had been strangled overnight, with an “undershirt/tank top arm strap tightly around [his] neck as a ligature.”
Ortega was imprisoned for pleading guilty in 2019 in McLean County for stealing a credit card from a parked car and then violating the terms of his probation. The ABC-7 report says that Ortega told family members that Miner was his cellmate.
Miner was dubbed by Chicago media as the “Hickory Street Murderer” from Joliet. In 2013, Miner and three others were accused of luring two men — 22-year-old friends Eric Glover and Terrance Rankins — into a Joliet home where they were then robbed, strangled, and had their bodies mutilated allegedly for sport. Miner was later convicted, and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
ABC7 says they have spent the last several months seeking information through the Freedom of Information Act on the investigation being conducted into Ortega’s death by the Illinois Department of Corrections into the incident but were frequently denied information or access for interviews.
Shortly after Ortega’s death, prison records show Miner was transferred to Menard Correctional Facility.
There have been four other reported in-custody deaths at Western Illinois Correctional Center since 2020. The public has not received much information or any at all on several of those incidents.
Miner is due to be arraigned on the charges in Brown County Circuit Court on February 10th.