Will County prosecutors Tuesday completed presenting their evidence and witnesses in the murder trial of a 19-year-old Joliet man charged with the May 1997 slaying of a Joliet West High School girl.
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The Will County state’s attorney’s office lead prosecutor in the case, Assistant State’s Atty. John McCabe, placed nearly two dozen witnesses on the stand over the last week. McCabe sought to prove to jurors that Christopher D. McCallum was responsible for strangling Davona Duncan, 18, with a wire on May 13 or 14, 1997, and disposing her body in a ditch outside the Joliet Country Club in unincorporated Will County.
Several witnesses testified that they saw Duncan’s 1989 Pontiac Grand Prix near McCallum’s home in the 200 block of McRoberts Street in Joliet the night and the day after she disappeared from her home in the 1300 block of Demmond Street in Joliet.
Prosecutors allege that in addition to killing Duncan, McCallum set her car ablaze after Duncan’s father and mother spotted their daughter’s car on the night of May 14 being driven by a man they believed might have been McCallum. Davona Duncan’s mother, Floretta Duncan, testified last week that she and her husband followed the car until the driver became suspicious, turned off the car’s headlights and sped away.
After Duncan’s body was found on May 26, 1997, McCallum was indicted first for arson, for allegedly setting Duncan’s car on fire, and, subsequently, for allegedly murdering Duncan.
After prosecutors rested their case against McCallum, McCallum’s attorney, Taher Kameli, began the task of trying to convince the jury that his client was innocent.
Among the witnesses he put on the stand on Tuesday where two clerks from the Red Roof Inn Motel adjacent to Interstate Highway 80 in Joliet. They testified that they separately had seen the victim in the hotel on either May 16 or May 17, 1997, two to three days after prosecutors and a forensic specialist testifying for the state contended Duncan was killed.
Kameli contends that all of the state’s evidence against his client is circumstantial and does not prove him guilty.