After their friend was charged with murdering his parents, three southwest suburban teens managed to hide their own involvement in the grisly slayings for a month despite detectives’ suspicions and their own loose lips, law enforcement officials said.
In initial interviews with police, the trio portrayed themselves as well-meaning friends who tried to stop John Granat Jr. from killing his parents Sept. 11, sources said. The teens believed themselves to be cooperating witnesses, as they willingly rebutted Granat’s alibi before a grand jury.
In conversations with friends, however, it was a much different story, law enforcement sources said. Several students at Amos Alonzo Stagg High School inPalos Hills knew crucial details about the slayings, officials said.
None of them went to police.
The investigation remains open and others still could face charges as accessories to murder, Cook County sheriff’s spokesman Steve Patterson said.
Granat’s lawyer would not say whether the teen had implicated his friends in the slayings of his parents, John and Maria. But authorities have said Granat, 17, told investigators that he had opened the house to allow others to rob it and returned home to find his parents dead.
The teens’ involvement remained a secret until one of them cracked under routine questioning Sunday, authorities said. The other two quickly followed, as prosecutors said the teens admitted to participating in Granat Jr.’s plot to kill his wealthy parents in their Palos Township home and split a wad of cash.
Christopher Wyma, 17, Mohammed Salahat, 17, and Ehab Qasem, 19, were charged Tuesday with killing the Granats, who were beaten with baseball bats as they slept in their beds. Maria Granat, 42, also was stabbed at least 20 times after showing signs of life following the pummeling, prosecutors said.
The arrests ended the teens’ monthlong charade as cooperating witnesses in the high-profile murder investigation, authorities said. In addition to poking holes in Granat’s alibi before the grand jury, the three also had told police that their friend wanted to kill his parents because they destroyed his marijuana stash, sources said.
One of the teens even showed police a text message he had saved in which he pleaded with Granat not to do it, sources said.
Law enforcement sources familiar with the case said new information and lingering questions about the three suspects’ stories led Cook County sheriff’s police detectives to reinterview them over the weekend.
Within hours, all three had confessed to their roles in the murders, the sources said.
The sources would not discuss the nature of the new information, but said there had always been questions about the teens’ alibis and how they conflicted with the timeline of events.
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Plus, they said, the crime scene had hinted that there was more than one assailant. For example, the victims were not restrained, making it unlikely that a single attacker could — or would even attempt — to kill them both alone
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sources said.
Wyma, the son of a longtime southwest suburban police officer, was the first to be questioned. He confessed while being asked to clarify his whereabouts on the night of the murders, sources said.
“The kid looks at them and says, ‘I’ll tell you where we hid the (weapon),'” one source said.
In detailed, video-recorded confessions, the teenagers told authorities they had been scheming to kill the Granats for several months, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said. During a Skype conversation among the teens on the afternoon of Sept. 10, Granat Jr. used the code word “concert” to signal that his friends should come over and enact their plan, authorities said.
“The code word was ‘concert’ and the concert was on,” Dart said.
Salahat drove Wyma and Qasem to the house and waited in the car as they went inside with Granat, carrying baseball bats, prosecutors said. Wyma and Qasem went to the bedroom where the Granats lay asleep in their bed. The two stood over the sleeping couple and pounded them with bats until their faces were nearly unrecognizable, authorities said.
When John Granat, 44, awoke during the attack and tried to fight back, Qasem and Wyma both pummeled him, according to court records.
While his friends bludgeoned his parents, Granat Jr. went downstairs to search for cash he knew his parents kept hidden, Dart said. Qasem soon joined Granat Jr. to tell him that his mother was still “making noises” in her room, prosecutors said. The 17-year-old responded by giving Qasem a knife and telling him to go back upstairs and “finish them off,” prosecutors said.
Qasem stabbed the woman “two to four times,” according to court records. He then gave the knife to Granat, who stabbed his mother “numerous” times, prosecutors said. An autopsy showed Maria Granat suffered some 20 stab wounds.
After the murders, the teens ransacked the house and found $35,000 in cash, prosecutors said. They drove to Wyma’s house and divided the money, then told Granat he had to go home and clean up the murder scene, prosecutors said.
As he drove home around 5 a.m. Granat was pulled over for a broken taillight by a Palos Hills police officer, who noted the teen was carrying $4,000 in cash and had a bottle of bleach or ammonia in the car. When police entered the Granats’ large, meticulously landscaped home on the morning of Sept. 11, the house reeked of cleaning products, police said.
Granat was arrested Sept. 12. His three friends testified before the grand jury the next day, according to court records. They denied Granat’s claim that he had been with them the night of the murders.
Sheriff’s police said a number of Stagg High School students were aware of what happened inside the Granat home but did nothing to help authorities. Wyma and Granat were students at Stagg, and Qasem had graduated from the school in the spring. Salahat attends Oak Lawn Community High School.
“Certainly there are other students who knew what happened and even more who knew something bad had happened and they said nothing. They said absolutely nothing,” Patterson said.
In court for their bond hearing Tuesday, the three teens stood silently with their lawyers as a crowd of relatives and supporters filled the gallery. Wyma’s father, a veteran Palos Hills police officer, was among them.
Wyma swayed anxiously, his eyes growing wide when Cook County Judge Peter Felice said he could face life in prison if convicted. All four teens were being held in protective custody at their own request.
Granat’s attorney, Rick Beuke, who watched the bond hearing, said the new charges suggest prosecutors were too quick to focus on his client, who maintains his innocence.
“Police go on and continue to investigate the case and wind up with three people who confess to not only their involvement but to their involvement with each other,” Beuke said. “While they were on the street for several weeks my client has been sitting in jail.”
Records in probate court say Granat’s relatives are contesting the teen’s right to collect an estate worth more than $2 million from his parents because of the pending murder charges.
Wyma’s attorney, John Russell, said the teen’s parents were stunned by the charges, and questioned what evidence prosecutors have other than the confession of a teen who had been interviewed without a lawyer present.
“My client is 17 with a very impressionable mind,” Russell said. “(Wyma’s parents) are absolutely shocked by these allegations. I don’t think anyone wakes up in the morning thinking their son could potentially do something like that.”
Salahat’s lawyer also questioned the fairness of interrogating a 17-year-old who does not realize that he’s a suspect in a murder case.
“My client doesn’t have a car or driver’s license, but he’s supposedly driving the getaway car? That doesn’t seem logical,” his attorney Joel Brodsky said.
Dart said he could not explain the faults within the alleged plot.
“This had been planned for a great deal of time and yet the execution of it was, you know, something that … leaves (you) scratching your head,” Dart said.
Granat appeared briefly Tuesday in a Bridgeview courtroom across the hall from his new co-defendants. He was arraigned on two counts of first-degree murder filed a month ago.
He has not cooperated with authorities since his arrest and only learned about the charges against his alleged accomplices Tuesday when he saw one of them on a Cook County sheriff’s transport back to the jail.
“He gets on the bus today and sees one of his best friends sitting in the front row,” a source said.
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