By Stefano Esposito
The Chicago Sun-Times
CHICAGO — Marcus Hendricks was willing to give an ex-con a chance -- willing even to hire someone like Bennie Teague, who had a lengthy and violent criminal history.
Teague brutally betrayed that trust on April 18, 2008, when he allegedly leveled an assault weapon at Hendricks inside his South Side plumbing store, killing him, and then opening fire on police a few blocks away, a Cook County jury heard Monday.
“This defendant, Bennie Teague, shot and killed Marcus Hendricks in a cold and calculated manner,” assistant state’s attorney Cathleen DeWald said in her opening statement at Teague’s trial. “Then he shot at three Chicago Police officers trying to do their duty. [He was] trying to kill them as well. Bold, brazen and deadly.”
Teague, 41, is charged with murder and the attempted murder of the three police officers who chased after him following Hendricks’ shooting inside his office near 115th and Halsted in the Roseland neighborhood. Hendricks’ slaying was featured in the Chicago Sun-Times 2008 series: “59 hours,” a “Stop the Killing” special report.
Prosecutors offered jurors no motive for Hendricks’ slaying, but at the time of the killing one law enforcement theory was that Teague killed his boss over debt -- perhaps a late paycheck.
Defense attorneys Monday cautioned jurors not to consider the case “open-and-shut.”
“Things are not always as they seem,” assistant public defender Rosa Maria Silva said in her opening statement.
She told jurors to expect inconsistent statements from witnesses who claimed to clearly see an armed Teague either coming in or out of Hendricks’ office about the time of the shooting.
Later Monday, a woman who was inside a beauty salon next door to Hendricks’ shop testified she saw Teague walking by carrying a “big gun” and wearing a white cloth that covered the lower half of his face. The woman, Regina Bolling, said she then saw Teague enter the plumbing shop. A few moments later she heard a “boom,” she said.
Perhaps the most dramatic testimony came later in the day, when Chicago Police Officer John McDermott testified that he was involved in a car chase with Teague, before Teague got out of his car and started shooting at McDermott and two other officers sitting in McDermott’s stopped squad car.
“Immediately, there was a ball of fire, and I heard a loud crack like a bull whip,” McDermott said, describing being shot at with an AK-47. Teague “was coming toward my car.”
Teague was arrested a few blocks away after the shoot-out with police.
The trial continues today.
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