Physical evidence lacking in 2012 killing
You could have opened a Burger King in the courthouse these past few days, what with the whoppers being told and recalled in the murder trial of Johnny Ray Priester.
Arrested nearly six years ago, Priester has been in the Sangamon County jail longer than any other inmate. He’s already beaten the rap on a charge of possessing a shank in the county lockup. A jury last year acquitted him in less than an hour.
Priester’s murder trial, which began March 12, could be wrapped up by publication time. It hasn’t been a simple case. With no physical evidence linking Priester to the killing of Quinton Harden, 20, the state’s attorney’s office was left with eyewitness testimony, some of it contradictory. Witnesses could not agree on whether the accused had showered with the aid of bleach, nor whether he had even gotten out of bed to commit the crime.
People were hanging out in the wee hours that Memorial Day in 2012, with folks at Priester’s house on North Eighth Street drinking and playing dominos in the front yard. Nearly a mile away, a halfdozen or so people were socializing at a home on the 1200 block of North 14 th Street. Shots rang out at 3:37 a.m.
Prosecutors said that Priester gunned down Harden on a porch after being summoned to a 14 th Street home by Shane Thompson, who’d been at the home and gotten into some sort of argument. “I didn’t feel comfortable with the individuals who were with me to fight with me,” Thompson testified. “He (Priester) became enraged.” After rousting Priester from his bed, Thompson testified that the two walked to the home on North 14 th , where the defendant pulled a gun and started firing.
Thompson said he was surprised to see the weapon, but the defense, suggesting that he (Thompson) might have been the true killer, pointed out that the witness was washing his clothes when police arrived shortly after the killing to question him. Thompson acknowledged that he had initially lied to police and that he didn’t finger Priester until he’d been in custody for several hours, during which time he became fearful of being charged himself. “Can we agree you are a liar?” James Elmore, Priester’s attorney, asked the witness. “When you told them (police) you’d do anything to stay out of prison, you accomplished that goal, didn’t you?” Six people were on the porch of the house where Harden was shot by a man who stood in front of the home, near a streetlight. Descriptions ran the gamut. One witness said the shooter wore gold plaid shorts, others said he was in black pants. One person said the gunman had his hair in braids. Someone saw an Elmer Fudd-tyle hat and gold teeth where others saw none. One person picked Priester from a photo lineup, another picked him from a live lineup conducted at the county jail. “The descriptions from witnesses, from people on the porch, was a bit all over the board, wasn’t it?” Elmore asked. “Correct,” answered Stephen Dahlkamp, a Springfield police detective.
Dahlkamp testified that he didn’t believe Steve Bennett, who told the jury that he was present during the shooting and had switched shirts with Priester immediately afterward, when Bennett claimed that he had used a ladder to climb on the roof of California Kitchen in midday to retrieve the gun that he had earlier placed on the restaurant’s roof, after receiving it from the defendant. After fetching the gun, Bennett testified that he buried the weapon, which police dug up next to a house. No fingerprints or DNA were recovered. Bennett had told detectives investigating the killing that he disliked guns. He testified in stripes, having been convicted of a federal gun charge last fall for which he is serving nearly six years.
Lastacia Wright, who was Priester’s girlfriend at the time of the killing, testified that she was in the yard of her home while the defendant slept upstairs, and there was no way that he could have left the house without her seeing him. She acknowledged that her account has changed with time and that she initially had said that Priester had taken a shower and used bleach to clean himself after the killing. That, she said, was a story concocted by Bennett, who convinced her that she would lose custody of her children if she said otherwise. Wright is currently charged with obstructing justice by prosecutors who say that the story she told the jury is a fib.
But Shawanna Underhill, who was staying at the house where Priester, Wright and Bennett lived, told police that the defendant had, in fact, used bleach to clean himself after the shooting. And she led police to ammunition that she had thrown alongside a road. She said that she’d found it amid Priester’s belongings after the killing. The live cartridges matched perfectly with spent shell casings found at the crime scene.
Contact Bruce Rushton at [email protected].
