‘ I DON’T RECALL’
Girlfriend of cop slain in 2010 a reluctant witness in murder trial of her accused brother
On the witness stand Wednesday, Keana Bayliss could remember how she met Chicago Police Officer David Blake in the spring of 2010.
Blake, off duty and driving his SUV, spotted flames coming from underneath her van a few blocks from her house and warned her to pull over and chatted her up while waiting for the Fire Department.
The next day, Blake stopped by the day care center where she worked, and soon she spent every weekend at his condo in Beverly.
But Bayliss was a reluctant witness against the man charged with killing Blake just five months after he pulled her over. Bayliss’ younger brother, Bernard Williams, is charged with the murder.
Bayliss attempted to plead the Fifth after just a few questions from Assistant State’s Attorney Arunas Buntinas, declining to answer when the prosecutor asked her: “You don’t want to testify here?”
Even after she was advised by her attorney and the judge that she was at no risk of prosecution if she testified truthfully, Bayliss had little to say. For nearly three hours, Bayliss sat primly with her arms resting on the edge of the witness box, repeating three words in response to nearly every question: “I don’t recall.”
Bayliss had provided key evidence to police investigators seven years ago, in grand jury testimony that Buntinas read to the jury each time she answered one of his questions with “I do not recall.”
In her testimony before the grand jury two months after Blake’s death, Bayliss said Williams had seen the gun safe inside Blake’s condo, and he told her weeks before the murder that he had a friend who could bust it open with a crowbar.
Soon after the murder, she said she overheard him confess to killing “Officer David” to his girlfriend, and had found a bloody T- shirt Blake had given to Williams, hidden in her house, later that day. Asked if she recalled making those statements, Bayliss replied: “I do not recall.”
Buntinas asked if Bayliss remembered “hearing Bernard Williams saying that he couldn’t take it anymore, that he had just killed Officer David, your boyfriend?”
“I don’t recall that,” Bayliss replied, drawing frowns from the half- dozen police officers in the courtroom gallery.
Retired Assistant State’s Attorney John Dillon testified on Wednesday that Bayliss actually repeated her testimony before the grand jury twice, on back- toback days, because a court reporter’s equipment had malfunctioned.
On cross- examination, Assistant Public Defender Crystal Carbellos hinted at a reason why Bayliss was so willing to implicate her brother in Blake’s murder seven years ago and so reluctant this week.
Judge Lawrence Flood barred Carbellos from asking Dillon about a civil lawsuit filed this week by Armando Serrano, who claims Flood and Chicago Police sent him to prison for 23 years for a murder they knew he didn’t commit.
Questioned by Carbellos, Bayliss did recall that her 2010 interrogation by police and prosecutors lasted at least 24 hours.
“I know I got picked up at night, and I didn’t get took home until another night,” she said.
Carbellos’ questions also suggested another reason for Bayliss’ willingness to cooperate with prosecutors before the grand jury.
“And isn’t it true that they threatened you? They threatened to take your children?” Carbellos asked. “Yes,” Bayliss said. “Isn’t it true that state’s attorney at that grand jury that you do remember going to [ told you] that if you changed your story that that would be perjury?” “Yes,” Bayliss replied. Prosecutors, reading from Bayliss’ grand jury transcript, noted that seven years ago, Bayliss said under oath she hadn’t been threatened.
Bayliss had told investigators, and the grand jury, that Williams had showed up at the day care center the day that Blake was killed and asked her for the keys to Blake’s condo so he could retrieve something for a friend. Blake agreed to pick Williams up and drive him back to the condo, news that — according to Bayliss’ grand jury testimony — Williams greeted by clapping his hands together and saying, “Yeah, boy!”
Blake had showed Williams and several friends his cache of rifles and handguns a few weeks before he was killed, posing with the weapons in photos snapped by his sister. Bayliss said she didn’t recall taking the pictures, but she did identify the people in them.
Williams’ friend Tyrone “T. J.” Jerry testified that Williams had been trying to recruit him to help steal the guns for several weeks and discussed the plan with other friends. The day Blake was killed, Jerry said he had gone to classes with his girlfriend at Moraine Valley Community College, hoping to avoid Williams, who had recently seemed more resolute about his plan.
“He was going to meet up with [ Blake], take him to an alley,” Jerry said. “He said he was going to shoot him and take his keys. He kept asking me, can I get a car.”
The night of Nov. 22, 2010, when Blake’s body was found slumped inside his SUV in an alley a few blocks from Jerry’s house, Williams turned up at Jerry’s house and confessed in Jerry’s bedroom in front of him and his girlfriend.
“He told me he lured him into alley ... he got out of the car, took the gun out, shot him in the head,” Jerry said.
Jerry’s girlfriend, Ladonna Williams, said Bernard Williams was “smirking” and said “I did it. I did it.”