Videotape dominates Day 2 of capital murder trial
Jurors heard a lot from accused murderer Robert Young on Wednesday.
Not from the witness stand of the Rolling Meadows courtroom where he's on trial for the 2006 murders of Buffalo Grove residents Catonis "Tony" Jones, 39, and Sharmaine "Cookie" Gregory, 42. But from the large television looming before the jury box where 12 jurors and two alternates spent most of Wednesday afternoon watching videotaped statements the 32-year-old Young made to police in the days following the stabbing deaths of Jones and his girlfriend, Gregory. Young has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder and could receive the death penalty if convicted.
Prosecutors Marilyn Hite-Ross and Karen Crothers played for the jury DVDs of several interviews between Young, formerly of the 500 block of Happfield Drive in Arlington Heights, and Detective Domenic Cappelluti, of the Waukegan Police Department and the Lake County Major Crime Task Force. Over the course of the interviews, Young described the uneasy friendship that began as a professional relationship between drug supplier (Young) and user (Jones), shifted to friendship and ultimately grew competitive after Young said Jones began selling drugs himself.
"If it wasn't for me he'd be locked up," said Young on the recording, parts of which were inaudible. "If it wasn't for me, he'd have no connects (connections)."
During his first interview with Cappelluti, Young claimed Jones "came at" him with a knife. In another interview, Young admitted that he, Jones and another friend James Stevens had been smoking crack for several hours before the murders, which defense attorney Bernard Sarley claimed Young committed in self-defense. Echoing Stevens' testimony from the first day of the trial, Young said that he and Jones got into an altercation.
"It was a scuffle we got into," said Young on the DVD, in which he also states that Gregory hit him while he and Jones scuffled.
During the interviews he stated several times he felt he was fighting for his life, adding that he just "blanked out."
"I snapped the (expletive deleted) out," he said to Cappelluti during their interview at the Buffalo Grove Police Department.
The videotaped statements followed a morning session during which jurors watched a 47-minute DVD of the crime scene. During a break earlier in the day, after the jury had left the courtroom, Judge Thomas Fecarotta warned spectators against "staring down" the defendant, adding that if the glares continued he would have deputies remove the observers from the court.
Prosecutors continue their case at 10:30 a.m. Thursday in Rolling Meadows courtroom 109.