Followup: 13yo murder trial begins
Anne Warfield
Girl's trial opens in killing of mother
Prosecution calls `attitude' a motive
By Kevin Lynch
Tribune staff reporter
May 31, 2001
Prosecutors said Wednesday that a Schaumburg girl who was 13 at the
time killed her mother by repeatedly stabbing her in "a crime of rage"
set off by the girl's resentment of the way her mother treated her.
But as the trial--conducted under unusual proceedings in which the
girl is being prosecuted as a juvenile but could be sentenced as an
adult--opened Wednesday, defense lawyers insisted the girl was
innocent. They said someone else stabbed Je Tuan Walters, 34, outside
her Schaumburg home Sept. 2 and that the girl tried to help her after
the crime.
Cook County Assistant State's Atty. Kip Owen told jurors during
opening statements that the girl's blood and fingerprint were found on
one of three knives used to stab her mother more than 200 times.
"The evidence is not going to establish her as a mother of the year,"
Owen told jurors. "She's not going to win any awards here. But it's
going to establish that she didn't deserve to die."
Using a diary with a passage "that talks about killing her mother by
stabbing her" and a videotaped statement the girl gave to Schaumburg
police, Owen said he will show that the girl's rocky relationship with
her mother sparked the fatal attack.
"You see, her mother had an attitude. These were [the girl's] words:
`Mother had an attitude,' " Owen said. "She would yell at her, and she
didn't like that."
The girl, who is 14 now, had been raised mostly by her
great-grandmother on the South Side and had gone to live with Walters
at the Walden Woods apartment complex just days before the killing,
Owen said.
If convicted, the girl will be sentenced as an adult under a law
prosecutors said has never been used in Cook County. That sentence
would then be set aside and the girl would be sentenced under juvenile
criminal laws to no fewer than five years. Under state law, she could
only be held in a juvenile facility until she turns 21.
Owen said that if she violated any terms of her sentence, prosecutors
would have the option of asking a judge to reimpose the adult
sentence, which could range from 20 to 60 years.
"The only way that adult sentence can ever be employed is if she
actually violates that juvenile court sentence," Owen said
If convicted, the sentencing measure would serve as an extra check on
the girl's behavior, Owen said. But because the measure has never been
used in Cook County, he added, it is unclear what kind of offense
would be serious enough to invoke her adult murder sentence.
In court Wednesday, defense attorney Robert Fox told jurors that blood
prosecutors will use as evidence was shed when the girl tried to
remove a knife left behind by the real assailant.
"It was a typical Saturday," Fox said of the day Walters was killed.
"There were no arguments, no rage incidents, nothing that would cause
anyone to kill her mother."
The girl, who sat writing quietly at the defense table during most of
Wednesday's statements, began to cry as Owen described the crime
scene.
"She's distraught. She's upset. She's never really gotten any
counseling regarding the death of her mother," defense lawyer Parle
Roe-Taylor said.
<http://chicagotribune.com/news/metro/mchenry/article/0,2669,SAV-0105310357,FF.html>
--
Anne Warfield
http://www.goodsol.com/cats/
JonesieCat
"Anne Warfield" <indi...@aol.comfounditallanyway> wrote in message
news:3b177b9e...@news.earthlink.net...
Thx for posing this story, Anne. The girl didn't live with her mother until
just before the murder - wonder what the child was like to live with before
that.
JC
JC
Anne Warfield
Cop quotes diary on slaying
Girl, 14, plotted how to stab her mom, he testifies
By Aamer Madhani
Tribune staff reporter
June 1, 2001
In her diary, the 13-year-old girl accused of fatally stabbing her
mother in front of their Schaumburg home wrote how she planned to go
about the killing, a Schaumburg police officer testified Thursday.
"Go and hide in the hall and stab her in the back until she dies,"
Detective Robert Czerniak read from a diary he said he found when
searching the girl's room the day after her mother, Je Taun Walters,
was killed.
The undated entry read in court continued with an explanation of how
she would tell her grandmother that her mother had gone out to get
something when she was killed.
Czerniak also told the jury in Cook County Juvenile Court that he
found a bread knife with blood residue on its teeth hidden in a
pillowcase in the girl's room.
Police Officer Mike Carroll testified that the girl told him she saw
another teenage girl flee right before she discovered her mother had
been stabbed.
Walters, 34, was stabbed more than 200 times as she sat in her car in
the parking lot outside her apartment complex on Sept. 2.
The testimony came as the trial, unusual because the girl is being
tried as a juvenile but could be sentenced as an adult, entered its
second day.
Walters' daughter, who is now 14, had moved in with her mother and her
mother's boyfriend, Christopher Morris, only days before the killing.
Cook County prosecutors allege the girl killed her mother because she
did not want to move from the South Side, where she had lived with her
great-grandmother.
Morris, who lived with Walters for five years, testified that he and
Walters had moved across the hall from a one-bedroom to a two-bedroom
apartment, so her daughter could move in with them. He said Walters
saw her daughter about once a month before they moved in together, and
the girl was always well behaved.
But Walters had become concerned about her daughter's grades and whom
she was hanging out with, Morris said.
"There were worries about boys," he said.
Prosecutors Thursday also called a paramedic who transported Walters
to the hospital, a trauma surgeon who operated on her and a
pathologist who performed the autopsy to describe the extent of her
injuries.
<http://chicagotribune.com/news/metro/chicago/article/0,2669,SAV-0106010352,FF.html>