Less than 24 hours after Hadiya Pendleton was slain while taking shelter from the rain in a South Side park, an officer from the cold-case homicide squad handed lead detective Frank Casale what would be the first big break in the case.
With none of the many witnesses able to identify the gunman, Chicago police focused their attention on the white Nissan Sentra he was seen riding off in. Members of the cold-case squad searched a police database for traffic stops of white Nissans near Harsh Park, the scene of the shooting, Casale testified Monday.
“As the shift changed, someone came up and said, ‘This may be of interest to you,’ ” Casale said.
The cold-case detectives had discovered a white Sentra had been stopped two days before the killing a couple of miles from the park. More tantalizing for investigators, the driver, Micheail Ward, lived in a CHA building near Harsh Park controlled by the Gangster Disciples faction that was at war with the 4-6 Terror gang, which used the park as a hangout.
The 2013 killing of Pendleton, 15, became a national symbol for Chicago’s gang violence. A sophomore drum majorette at King College Prep High School, she had performed just a week earlier at an event for President Barack Obama’s second inauguration.
The testimony came at a hearing into a request by Ward to throw out his arrest, but Judge Nicholas Ford ruled that police had probable cause to arrest him as he went to celebrate a friend’s birthday at a suburban strip club. He and co-defendant Kenneth Williams have pleaded not guilty to the 162-count indictment.
The hearing provided new details of the police investigation into the high-profile case, which is likely to go to trial later this year. Hadiya’s mother, Cleopatra Cowley-Pendleton, listened from the front row of the spectator gallery.
According to Monday’s testimony, Pendleton’s killing drew a massive police response, with at least six detectives, officers from two gang units and dozens of other cops working in shifts around the clock.
After learning Ward had been stopped driving the Nissan, police ran its license plate number through a database of red light violations. They also checked Ward’s name in another database, learning that he was a documented member of the Gangster Disciples’ SUWU faction, at war with 4-6 Terror gang.
A witness who Casale took out in a “covert van” four days after the shooting identified Ward’s mother’s car — which was parked on the street in the 300 block of East 59th Street — as the one he’d seen driving away from the shooting.
“He said, ‘That’s the car — that’s the same color, the same wheels, the same everything,’ ” Casale testified.
A witness also later tentatively identified Ward as the gunman in a photo array, he testified.
Eight days after the killing, detectives got another big break when a member of the 4-6 Terror gang being held at the Cook County Jail reached out to gang intelligence officers there, according to Casale.
The inmate told them his girlfriend was related to an SUWU gang member and recent parolee Ernest Finner, who had been picked up by Ward and co-defendant Williams moments after Hadiya’s killing and heard Williams talking about the shooting, he said.
Police were able to corroborate the story using video from a Chicago police camera near the intersection where Finner and his friend Demetrius Tucker were picked up along with surveillance video from the CHA building where the men lived.
A day later, they interviewed Finner and Tucker, who told them that they had heard Williams say in the car that he and Ward had just done a “drill” — slang for a shooting. Williams also said they were looking for gang rivals to shoot before opening fire at “the park,” the two told police.
Prosecutors also want the judge to allow them to use Ward’s silence in the car as a “tacit admission” that he participated in the shooting.
Twitter @SteveSchmadeke
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