Defendant Olaska Takes Stand In Murder Trial of Naperville Teacher

Caption: Daniel Olaska, 30, of Naperville, is accused of stabbing a teacher and two other men in a Naperville bar fight in February 2012.

The defendant on trial for allegedly killing a second-grade teacher in a Naperville bar and the attempted murder of two other men took the witness stand in his own defense on Tuesday.

It was another dramatic turn in a trial that has seen security video from Frankie’s Blue Room replayed frame by frame of the last moments 24-year-old Shaun Wild, a Naperville elementary school teacher.

Daniel Olaska, 30, was grilled for three hours of his recollections of the early morning hours of Feb. 4, 2012, when Wild’s friend, Willlie Hayes, sat in a booth across from him. Although the two men didn’t know each other, Olaska testified that their conversation quickly became heated, the Chicago Tribune reported.

Olaska said he was afraid when Hayes threatened to beat him up because “he was huge.”

“I didn’t want to get up and fight him,” Olaska said on the stand. “He was huge.”

When Wild came to try to calm down his former teammate on the North Central College football team, Hayes turned back toward Olaska.

Thinking that Hayes was going to make good on his promise to “beat the crap out of him,” he reached across the table and stabbed Hayes in the chest, the Tribune said.

Olaska testified that he carried a knife with him because he needed it for his job as an aviation manager.

After he stabbed Hayes, Olaska said he stabbed Wild’s arm when the teacher went after Olaske to detain him. When he reached out to punch Wild, the knife went through Wild’s heart instead, the paper said. Tuesday’s court proceedings also include a jailhouse recordings of conversations between Olaska, his father, and brother-in-law.

Olaska told DuPage County prosecutor Demetri Demopoulos that he “wasn’t thinking” when asked why he ran out of the bar after his run-in.

Read the full story in the Chicago Tribune.