Kenneth Williams | Homicide Watch Chicago

Stepfather of alleged Pendleton killer says he is innocent

John Carpenter — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:55:45 -0500

Chicago Sun-Times (IL) - Saturday, February 16, 2013

Author/Byline: Stefano Esposito ; Staff

Under different circumstances, President Obama’s speech at Hyde Park Academy High School on Friday might have simply been a proud occasion for Mike Lopez.
After all, the South Side man’s 15-year-old stepdaughter was among the students there to hear the president talk about putting an end to senseless killings, like that of Hadiya Pendleton .

But in an odd and painful coincidence, Obama was also talking, indirectly, about Lopez’s other stepchild, Kenneth Williams — one of the two charged with Hadiya ’s murder.

“It was very ironic,” said Lopez, in his first interview since his stepson’s arrest about a week ago.

Lopez, a self-employed caterer, is speaking out now because he wants the public to know Williams is more than a booking mugshot — and that he’s innocent.

“I ask that they let the system work the way it’s meant to work, where we are innocent until proven guilty,” said Lopez, 44, who is married to Williams’ biological mother, Julia Beal-Lopez.

Police say Williams, 20, and Michael Ward, 18, were gang-bangers out for vengeance Jan. 29, when Ward allegedly opened fire, killing 15-year-old Hadiya , who was seeking shelter from the rain with friends under a canopy at Harsh Park in the 4400 block of South Oakenwald. Ward and Williams mistook the group for a rival gang suspected of shooting Williams in the arm near his Chicago Housing Authority home at 39th and South Lake Park last summer, investigators say. He allegedly told another person about his role in the murder. But Williams never confessed to police, Lopez said.

Lopez says police are the ones who’ve made the bad I.D. Lopez described a neighborhood so thick with gang-bangers, so rife with gunfire, that sometimes the innocent get unjustly branded with the gang-banger label.

Williams, a 2011 King College Prep High School graduate, was a kid with a future — in the U.S. Air Force, Lopez said.

“He would have been getting ready to leave for basic training in the next month or so,” Lopez said.

Lopez isn’t alone in that opinion. Half a dozen teachers at King College Prep recalled Williams as a smart, charming student.

“He was no angel, but he could write and speak well,” said teacher Jocelyn Alexander Shaw, who had Williams in her English class in 2010. “Of my boys in class, he participated in discussion quite often, making for a great contribution. He was a jokester who was liked by many. Overall, he was a pretty charming kid with the baby face that made it pretty hard to stay mad at him for whatever reason.”

James McKatherine, the school’s former baseball coach and a current Chicago Police officer, remembered Williams as a not particularly gifted, but unusually dedicated, athlete. Williams would stay hours late, working on his pitching and fielding.

“He showed up early, left late, got extra hitting in, extra fielding — trying to make the starting line-up,” which, said McKatherine, he never did.

If Williams was in a gang, half a dozen of his teachers never suspected it.

“He was well groomed,” said Ronald Stewart Jr., chair of the P.E. department. “He wasn’t boasting about anything. He was just a real good kid.”

With ambitions of joining the Air Force, Williams appeared to be heading for a good future. He took classes at Malcolm X College and he had a part-time job at Macy’s on State Street, Lopez said.

And then one July evening last summer, Williams was walking not far from his home, when three men approached. Williams would later tell police two of them had handguns. He told police he ran and that he was shot in the arm. He said he knew one of the men from his neighborhood. But he wouldn’t give police a name.

The “no-snitch code” is an on-going frustration for Chicago detectives trying to tackle gang violence, but Lopez said he understands it.

“I encouraged him to press charges,” Lopez said. “Unfortunately, the way things are now — if you do that, then you’re considered a rat or a snitch, even if you’re a victim.”

But Lopez said Williams’ lack of cooperation doesn’t make him a criminal. He said Williams and Ward weren’t buddies, weren’t together when Hadiya was shot — even though one neighbor in the building where Williams lived said she saw the two young men together often.

On Friday evening, hours after Obama’s speech ended, Lopez was thinking of a different connection — the one he says he now shares with Hadiya ’s family.

“We deeply feel for them,” Lopez said. “I don’t know what it’s like to lose a child, but I’m experiencing it now. . . Unfortunately, via Hadiya ’s death, our son has been taken away from us.”

Alleged killer: ‘She was simply there’

John Carpenter — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:53:40 -0500

Chicago Sun-Times (IL) - Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Author/Byline: RUMMANA HUSSAIN AND MITCH DUDEK ; Staff Reporters

The gunman who allegedly killed Hadiya Pendleton in a South Side park chalked her death up to the collateral damage of an ongoing three-year gang war, telling police the 15-year-old girl had “nothing to do with it. She was simply there.”
In bond court Tuesday, Cook County prosecutors said Michael Ward, 18, made the comments to police in a videotaped confession after he was taken into custody along with his alleged getaway driver, Kenneth Williams, 20. Both men were denied bail.

The two were arrested while driving to a strip club in Harvey on Saturday, the same day first lady Michelle Obama attended the funeral of the King College Prep student. Hadiya performed as a baton-twirling majorette at festivities surrounding President Barack Obama’s inauguration in the nation’s capital with her school band the week before she was killed.

Both men are charged with first-degree murder and two counts of aggravated battery with a firearm.

The men were driving around in Ward’s mom’s white Nissan on Jan. 29 looking for rival gang members when they encounteredHadiya and her friends, who’d just finished school exams and had sought shelter from the rain under a canopy at the park on the 4400 block of South Oakenwald, authorities said. None in the group had gang ties.

Ward snuck up on the teens and allegedly fired six shots — striking Hadiya in the back, and wounding two other teens.

Ward, who’d lost a friend in the gang feud, later tried to rationalize the shooting by telling police, “If we keep standing for this, we are going to be some straight bitches,” said assistant state’s attorney Jennifer Sexton.

Speaking on the loss of his friend, Ward told police, “It hurt, it hurt. It hurt to a point where everyone had to go,” prosecutors said.

Ward’s alleged accomplice and wheelman had been shot in the arm in July but refused to help police prosecute the man police arrested for the crime, police said.

“They go driving around looking for gang members, but that’s not who gets shot,” said State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez. “Who gets shot are three innocent kids. It’s just an example of what happens when someone decides to take it on their own to get revenge for something that had happened to them.”

The Nissan was captured by surveillance cameras before and after the shooting and cell records show that Williams was in the park at the time of the murder, prosecutors said.

Williams, a King College Prep graduate, had a previous conviction for retail theft.

Ward, who had a 2011 unlawful use of a weapon conviction, also has a juvenile record for robbery, theft and aggravated battery, prosecutors said.

Alvarez touched upon the need for stricter gun laws and how Ward was able to skip prison time for his weapons violation based on his age.

Ward was arrested for misdemeanor criminal trespass late last year, but the probation department did not notify prosecutors, Alvarez said.

Mistakes were made, Alvarez said following the hearing.

Ward is currently taking courses at Malcolm X College and works as a janitor for a temp agency, his attorney Jeffrey Granich said.

Granich said a warrant was never issued before Ward was arrested, and that his pleas for an attorney during his 48 hours in police custody were ignored.

“This is a serious criminal case. This is not a political situation. This is not a political platform. The problem when criminal cases get made into political cases is rules are bent, mistakes are made ...,” Granich said.

Williams’ attorney Matthew McQuaid said his client is not in a gang, did not make any statements implicating himself in the murder to detectives and is employed by an air courier service at O’Hare Airport. He added that Williams was not identified in a lineup.

Family friends of Hadiya ’s relatives said they were happy Ward and Williams are locked up but said they were frustrated by the violence that is enveloping the city.

“They need to be off the streets,” said David Smith, a family friend. “These guys were running around hunting for people, just anybody. It really didn’t matter.”

Alleged Hadiya Pendleton killers plead not guilty

John Carpenter — Fri, 05 Apr 2013 13:51:41 -0500

Chicago Sun-Times (IL) - Thursday, March 28, 2013

Author/Byline: RUMMANA HUSSAIN ; Criminal Courts

Hadiya Pendleton ’s alleged killers pleaded not guilty to several dozen counts of murder and myriad other charges Thursday in the high-profile slaying of the 15-year-old honors student.
Nathaniel Pendleton , the girl’s father, said he felt “some bit of anger” seeing purported gang members Michael Ward and Kenneth Williams in court, but he said he wants to focus on being “peaceful” and highlighting the importance of non-violence.

“I’m trying to not think about it,” Pendleton said of losing his daughter in the Jan. 29 shooting in a South Side park.

Meanwhile, Ward’s attorney expressed dismay at the 141 first-degree murder counts revealed against his client.

Williams, the alleged getaway driver, is facing 17 first-degree murder counts.

Prosecutors often deliver several count murder indictments, which are eventually merged at trial, but Jeffrey Granich said Ward’s 100-plus counts were “absurd” and an attempt by the Cook County state’s attorney’s office to pander to the press and politicians.

“[Prosecutors] are trying to show, ‘Look how seriously we are taking the case.’ But they look stupid and foolish,” the defense attorney said.

Officials with the state’s attorney’s office did not return calls to address Granich’s comments.

Ward, 18, was the alleged gunman who killed Pendelton and injured her two friends as they sought shelter from the rain under a park canopy in the 4400 block of South Oakenwald.

Ward later told police that he and Williams, 20, were looking for rival gang members to shoot and that Hadiya had nothing to do with their street war, prosecutors said.

Just a week before she was gunned down, Hadiya performed as a baton-twirling majorette at festivities surrounding President Barack Obama’s inauguration in the nation’s capital with her school band, prompting national headlines surrounding her death.

First lady Michelle Obama attended the King College Prep student’s funeral.

Nathaniel Pendleton said that he and Hadiya ’s mother, Cleopatra — who stood alongside Barack Obama as he spoke about gun control at the White House Thursday morning — are starting the Hadiya Foundation, an organization that will focus on combating gun violence.

“We’re just trying to make good things come from something bad,” Hadiya ’s father said.

Ward and Williams are currently being held without bail in Cook County Jail.

In addition to murder, they also face attempted murder, aggravated battery, aggravated discharge of a firearm and mob action charges.