Defense Attorney Re-Plays 911 Call for Kelli's Mom on Stand

Caption: The ”Justice for Kelli Joy O’Laughlin” Facebook page has been marking each day of testimony with a corresponding grade school photo of Kelli. Friday, the eighth day of testimony, showed Kelli in the eighth grade, a year before the Lyons Township freshman was killed.

The state formally rested its case on Friday in the trial of a Chicago man accused of murdering an Indian Head Park teen in October 2011.

The attorney for defendant, John Wilson Jr., 41, who sat in court attired in a sweater and dark jeans, called his first witness to the stand: the mother of murdered 14-year-old Kelli O’Laughlin.

Defense attorney John Paul Carroll played on a recurring theme that the Lyons Township High School freshman may have committed suicide based, on statements Brenda O’Laughlin made to a 911 dispatcher.

Carroll replayed the gut-wrenching 911 call that O’Laughlin placed shortly after 5 p.m. on Oct. 27, 2011, when she came home from work and found her daughter bleeding from eight stab wounds on the kitchen floor.

“Hurry, I think my daughter committed suicide, hurry,” a distraught Brenda O’Laughlin says.

Asked by the 911 dispatcher if Kelli is breathing, her mother says she doesn’t know because there is so much blood.

O’Laughlin also noted that there was a knife on the floor and that she didn’t want to turn her over to administer CPR. As other dispatchers cut in on the call and order paramedics to the O’Laughlin home in the 6300 block of Keokuk, the girl’s mother can be heard in the background: “I can’t believe she would do this.”

Carroll then walked more than a dozen of the collectable coins allegedly stolen by Wilson to stand and asked O’Laughlin to identify each of them one by one. Prosecutors maintain that Kelli interrupted Wilson in the middle a burglary.

Also called to the stand were members of the South Suburban Major Crimes Task Force assigned to the case on Oct. 27, 2011.

Questioning focused on Hernandez Landscaping, whose employees had been on working on the O’Laughlin property earlier that day.

Carroll asked one officer if a person of interest had ever lied to him.

A resident of the neighborhood whose son rode home on the bus with Kelli the day she was found murdered, described how she had gone for a walk around 6 p.m. Oct. 27, 2011.

As she walked up Black Hawk Trail, Debra Warf described her encounter with a strange man about 40 years year old, standing between two driveways, straddling a backpack between his legs.

Warf testified that the man, who “appeared not to belong in the neighborhood,” was white.

Prosecutor Andreana Turano cross examined Warf, who told jurors that she cut her walk short when she observed numerous police vehicles and yellow crime tape up around the back of the O’Laughlin home.

“In fact, there were lots of plainclothes police officers in the neighborhood,” Turano asked Warf.

She agreed that there were.

Also called to the stand was Tricia Koning, an Indian Head Park resident, who testified that she returned home from work at an “unusual time” between 3 and 3:15 p.m. on Oct. 27, 2011.

Koning said that as she pulled off of Plainfield Road on to the frontage road, she saw a man come out from the second house near the park. She waved at him but he did not wave back.

Koning described him as an “African-American gentleman,” dressed in dark clothing, who wore a dark-colored backpack slung over his shoulders with silver reflector tape on it. The front of his shirt appeared to have bits of sawdust or debris on it, she testified.

“He was in a hurry,” she said. “The leaves were skittering.”

Sgt. William Vest, of the Cook County Sheriff’s Department, testified that he was supervising a crew from the Sheriff’s Alternative Work Program, that was picking up litter beneath the I-294 underpass near Indian Head Park.

Upon cross examination, Vest told Turano there were no unusual incidents and that no one had strayed away from the crew on Oct. 27, 2011.

Carroll told the the judge there was one more witness for the defense but she wasn’t able to come to court.

Cook County Associate Judge John Hynes adjourned court for the day. After hearing from the last defense witness, he told attorneys that he intended to complete the trial on Monday.

Other trial highlights:

• Several people have asked if John Paul Carroll, the attorney representing defendant John Wilson, Jr., is a public defender. The answer is no, although Carroll is representing Wilson pro-bono. The attorney, once a Chicago homicide detective, specializes in personal injury, medical malpractice and serious criminal defense cases. His firm’s usual fees for a murder defense are $30,000. “If cost is your main concern then you should call other attorneys until you find a cheaper one,” his website states.
• ABC-7’s Ben Bradley has attended every day of the trial. Check out his report here.
• Residents of Indian Head Park, La Grange and Western Springs continue to attend the trial to show their support for the O’Laughlin family, including several parents from Lyons Township High School, whose children either attended school with Kelli’s siblings or with Kelli.