JOLIET, IL — The Tomczak Law Group had their chance on Thursday morning to cross examine Joliet Police Detective Christopher Moore, a street gang expert for his department, during the second week of the first-degree murder trial for Shorewood's Jon Hansen.
Hansen is accused in two shootings that left one man dead in Joliet Township and a second man wounded on Joliet's Davis Street. Those shootings happened the same day police believe Hansen's friend, Romeo Nance, killed seven of his family members on Joliet's West Acres Road.
A key issue related to the prosecution's case concerns whether Hansen was a member of the Milwaukee Kings street gang. But during cross-examination from Hansen's defense lawyer, Anna Rose Bertani, Moore was asked to look into the courtroom and answer whether the 27-year-old Hansen had in fact any tattoos of the numbers 13 and 11 on his face. The two numbers, according to the prosecutors, symbolize the letters M and K in the alphabet, hence M and K for Milwaukee Kings.
Moore testified that Hansen, as he sat in the courtroom of Judge Jessica Colon-Sayre, on Thursday morning, did not have any tattoos on his face or his body containing the numbers 13 and 11 in reference to the Milwaukee Kings.
Bertani also showed the jury the Facebook message thread involving Hansen, Romeo Nance and two other unknown people who used the following names on Facebook: MK Meechee and MK Boba Fett.
In regard to Hansen, her client did not use the initials "MK" in front of his name or as part of his Facebook user profile, the detective agreed with Bertani.
Bertani also asked Detective Moore, "is it possible to just use these words and be a wannabe?"
"Yes," he said.
Moore did inform the jury that the colors of red and black are known to be the gang colors for the Vice Lords, the street gang that Hansen wanted to harm, according to the prosecution.
However, Bertani asked the detective gang expert whether ordinary, everyday people often wear red and black.
"Yes. If they like the (Chicago) Bulls," he testified.
"Who doesn't?" Bertani responded with a laugh.
During the first-degree murder trial for the Shorewood resident, the prosecutors are working to convince the jury that Hansen—not Romeo Nance—carried out the last two Joliet shootings on Sunday, Jan. 21, 2024.
They allege Hansen was targeting people he believed were members of the rival Vice Lords gang.
As the cross examination continued, Detective Moore testified that Hansen, during his 2024 interview with the police, identified Romeo Nance as well as another man by name as being members of the Milwaukee Kings.
Moore was asked to translate a text message that Hansen apparently sent to Nance at 10:27 a.m. on the morning of the mass shootings carried out by Nance upon Nance's entire family. The Facebook message from Hansen, according to the prosecution, had nothing to do with Nance's intentions of slaying his entire family later that day at their homes on West Acres Road.
Moore testified that his interpretation of Hansen's message to Nance was that "he'd hang with him in order to shoot someone."
The Nance family was slaughtered inside their two houses across the street from one another at noon and then at 12:07 p.m. according to trial testimony. The two later shootings in the 200 block of Davis Street and at the Pheasant Run apartment complex did not happen until after 4 p.m.
According to this week's trial testimony, Nance drove out to Shorewood and picked up Hansen and Hansen's girlfriend Madison Bulow-Padilla after 2:30 p.m. The three then drove around for a while, stopping at the 7-Eleven in Shorewood where Hansen purchased gloves, then later driving to Calderon Liquors in Joliet before driving past the Joliet police station. Finally, Nance's maroon car drove to Davis Street, where Mario Guerrero was shot in the leg, and then Toyosi Bakare was fatally shot after taking out his garbage at his Pheasant Run apartment complex, the trial testimony showed.
Before Moore resumed his testimony on Thursday morning and before the jury was seated in Courtroom 502, the lawyers for both sides engaged in oral arguments concerning Moore's knowledge of a Joliet police interview that one of his fellow detectives had with Hansen's girlfriend.
However, in the end, Judge Jessica Colon-Sayre ruled that the defense would not be able to ask Moore about the details of her interview with someone else.
Prosecutor Alexandra Molesky revealed that the Will County State's Attorney's Office had already received information that Bulow-Padilla would invoke her Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination if she got called to the witness stand, so the prosecution does not plan to use her as a witness at this point.
"It would be unethical to call her ... knowing she intends to assert her Fifth Amendment," Molesky told the courtroom.
At one point during the back-and-forth arguments involving the lawyers, Judge Colon-Sayre advised the Tomczak Law Group that if they wanted the jury to hear or learn more details regarding Hansen's girlfriend's recollection of what she saw and heard being said inside Nance's car that afternoon, "Bring her in. Bring her in to testify."
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