Witness recants in Addison Trail student’s murder

A former Addison teen who implicated her boyfriend in a murder recanted on the witness stand Wednesday, saying she was not with him when he allegedly shot and killed her 18-year-old neighbor.

“I wasn’t there,” Josefina Vasquez, 19, told a DuPage County jury. “I don’t know what happened to him. I was sleeping.”

The testimony came in stark contrast to what Vasquez told investigators probing the fatal shooting of Addison Trail High School senior Armando Huerta Jr. on May 16, 2009.

After Huerta was gunned down outside his family’s apartment on the 300 block of Dale Drive, Vasquez gave a videotaped statement explaining how she watched in fear as her then-boyfriend, Luis Villavicencio-Serna, cocked a handgun and fired at Huerta three to five times from a passing car.

At the time, Vasquez said Villavicencio-Serna was jealous because Huerta — an ex-boyfriend, neighbor and classmate at her school — had been calling her and sending her text messages.

On Wednesday, she maintained that Villavicencio-Serna “did not like Armando at all” and had threatened to shoot him if he continued to contact her. But she said she was in the defendant’s apartment in Chicago sleeping when Huerta was shot.

Vasquez said she fell asleep about 2 a.m. and awoke about 5 a.m. She said Villavicencio-Serna must have left at some point because he was cool to the touch and wearing jeans when she awoke.

“I was at his house the whole time,” she said, at times wiping away tears.

Vasquez accused investigators of yelling at her, feeding her details of the slaying and threatening to put her in jail if she didn’t corroborate their theory. She said she picked her boyfriend out of a photo lineup and helped with diagrams of the murder, all while under pressure by police.

Addison Police Detective Frank Pope denied the accusations, testifying that neither he nor any other officers treated Vasquez the way she said.

Huerta was shot with a .22 caliber handgun about 3:30 a.m. as he drank beer with a friend in the parking lot outside his home, prosecutors said. He was less than a month away from his high school graduation.

The trial for Villavicencio-Serna, 21, resumes Thursday and is expected to last about a week.