Following a meeting with Police Department brass Tuesday, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said it was too soon to definitively say whether a pregnant woman gunned down Sunday in Back of the Yards was killed because she testified in a murder trial earlier this summer.
“I don’t want to leap to conclusions, obviously that would be a very, very serious issue,” Lightfoot said of the potential murder of a state’s witness. She added that the city would “not spare any expense” finding the person who pulled the trigger.
Lightfoot said detectives were actively tracking down a number of leads related to the killing of 18-year-old Treja Kelley, who testified in June against Deonte Davis in the 2016 slaying of Kelley’s cousin, Christopher Fields, 17. Davis was later convicted.
Lightfoot further said the Cook County state’s attorney’s office had reached out to all the witnesses who had testified in the case.
The mayor called Kelley’s killing “tragic” but didn’t want to speculate on the case until more was known.
“I’m very, very concerned about it and clearly our condolences go out to her family,” Lightfoot said.
Lightfoot hoped the woman’s killing wouldn’t stop other witnesses to crime from coming forward
“It’s really important that we get the cooperation of witnesses to be able to bring people to justice,” Lightfoot said.
Lightfoot said she doesn’t support a citywide witness protection program as previously proposed, feeling it would send a message that the city cannot protect witnesses in their neighborhoods.
Mayoral candidate and former Chicago Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas had proposed last year that the city relocate witnesses to other neighborhoods in the city, find them housing and provide them with stipends.
“Extracting people out of their neighborhoods, relocating them somewhere. To what end? For how long? At what cost?” Lightfoot questioned. “Those are the kinds of things that weren’t fleshed out in Paul Vallas’ proposal, which is why I don’t support it.”
Kelley, who was three months pregnant, was walking home from work Sunday night in the 900 block of West 52nd Street when a man emerged from an alley and repeatedly shot her.
Kelley graduated from UIC College Prep in June and had planned to study at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a neighbor told the Chicago Sun-Times.
