Hadiya’s friend testifies; panicked 911 call played on Day 1 of trial
Best friend of slain 15-year-old recalls holding her hand, telling her ‘it would be all right’
Klyn Jones doubled over on the witness stand, sobbing softly as she listened to her own voice shrieking at a 911 dispatcher more than five years ago.
Jones, 21, had walked confidently into the courtroom and remained composed for most of the two hours she spent testifying Tuesday at the trial of the two men charged with the 2013 murder of her best friend, Hadiya Pendleton. Speaking in a soft voice, she recalled seeing a gunman pointing a weapon at her and her friends as they stood underneath a canopy in Harsh Park, and of running at the sound of gunshots. Hadiya fell as she ran, and Jones and her friends stopped to help her. Jones recalled holding Hadiya’s hand as they waited for police to arrive.
“And I just held her, and told her it would be all right, until the police came,” Jones said, as Pendleton’s mother, dressed in black and seated a few feet from the jury, nodded.
The moments before that sounded far more harrowing. In the 911 recording, Jones’ voice is unintelligible as she screams for help and struggles to identify the address. After about a minute, the voice of a woman cuts in, a nurse who lived nearby and took the phone from the then-15-year-old Jones.
“We got a female down,” the woman said, her voice clear despite the wailing of terrified teenage girls in the background. “Gunshot wound.”
Jones was the first witness to testify for the prosecution Tuesday at the trial of two men charged with the 15-year-old Pendleton’s murder — accused gunman Micheail Ward, and Kenneth Williams, his getaway driver.
Prosecutors said the pair were members of the SUWU street gang. Looking to find members of a rival gang, Ward is accused of mistakenly opening fire on Hadiya and a group of her King College Prep High School classmates who were hanging out in the South Side park.
In opening statements, Assistant Prosecutor Barbara Hawkins gave jurors an even more stark version of Jones’ account of Pendleton’s final moments.
“Klyn Jones held the hand of her best friend. She held the hand of her friend Hadiya Pendleton as she bled out into the street,” Dawkins said.
Ward’s lawyer, Assistant Public Defender Julie Koehler, also didn’t shrink from the bitter coincidence that made Pendleton’s death a national news story: the honor student and band majorette had performed at a Washington, D.C., event celebrating Chicagoan Barack Obama’s second inauguration as president, Koehler noted.
“Eight days after one of the most memorable moments in this young girl’s life, she is shot dead in some Chicago park a mile away from the president’s house,” she said. “This garnered national attention that was absolutely well-deserved.”
Koehler presented the charges against Ward and Williams as the result of a string of bad assumptions that led police to fixate on the pair, building their case with statements of parolees who were bullied into pointing the finger at Ward and Williams with threats of more jail time. Investigators never recovered the murder weapon or shell casings from the shooting, and no physical evidence links Ward or Williams to the crime, she said. The most damning evidence against her client, his own videotaped confession, came after the 18-year-old had spent 48 hours in police custody.
His confession had important facts wrong, Koehler said. Ward told detectives the shooting happened in another park several blocks away; he said he used the wrong type of gun; and he incorrectly described how rival gang members in the park used Pendleton as a shield from the gunshots, Koehler said.
“That statement is actually evidence of his innocence, not his guilt,” she said.
Prosecutors said that Ward and Williams believed they were targeting members of the rival 46 Terror faction when they opened fire on Hadiya and her friends.
Prosecutors Tuesday called Ronald Evans, a former police officer in Chicago and suburban Countryside — who lost his badge in 2013 after pleading guilty to fraud charges for misusing a $1.2 million state grant — who heard the gunshots and saw a teenage boy running though an alley, wearing a hooded sweatshirt in a “unique” shade of blue, holding a gun, and then get into a waiting white Nissan.
Ward and Williams’ childhood friend and fellow SUWU gang member Ernest Finner proved a more reluctant witness. Finner, who also boasts a lengthy criminal record, responded to nearly all questions posed to him with “I don’t remember.”
Granted permission to treat Finner as a hostile witness, Assistant State’s Attorney Brian Holmes read back Finner’s 2013 testimony before a grand jury. Then, Finner had said Williams said he and Ward had “done a drill”— meaning they had shot at rivals — shortly after Pendleton was killed, and that the SUWUs held a membership meeting to discuss how they would deal with added pressure from the police investigation.
On cross examination, Finner’s memory proved better as he tried to recall how he came to be questioned by police: his parole officer ordered him to come in for a drug test, and when he arrived, he was handcuffed and told by police that he would be sent back to prison on a probation violation, and his mother would lose her job with the sheriff ’s department.