Jessica Mejia’s mother testified calmly at the Circuit Court of Cook County Thursday, but only until her attorney, Don Perry, asked her how she learned about her daughter’s death in a 2009 car crash.
A sheriff’s officer who arrived at her house, “opened a binder and he said that Jessica was killed in a crash,” said Christina Tucker, formerly Christina Mejia, her eyes suddenly welling up for the first of many times as she shared her story.
Losing her 20-year-old daughter, she said, would soon be followed by another blow to her family — hurtful rumors about the way Mejia died.
“One of my friends said her friend said that he knew somebody who saw her with her panties down,” she said, crying. “The word panties is scarring to me. And to see those pictures and my daughter exposed like that?”
The rumors didn’t stop, she said, recounting various instances in which people called or came up to her speculating that her daughter must have been naked and having sex when she died.
What happened, she alleges in a 2010 complaint filed together with her ex-husband Louis Mejia, her son Louis Mejia Jr. and daughter Gabriela Mejia: that two sheriff’s officers caused the family emotional distress by undressing and photographing Mejia’s mostly nude body.
Maria Lopez and Don Stewart, evidence technicians for the sheriff’s department, testified Wednesday that protocol, efficiency and preservation of trace evidence were the reasons behind their decision to undress and photograph Mejia’s body over a tarp on the snowy ground of the crime scene where she died on Dec. 31, 2009.
The Mejias’ complaint states that after the defendants placed Mejia on a tarp, they “proceeded to remove her clothing, pull down her blue jeans and pull up her blouse and bra, thereby exposing her bare breasts, stomach, back, underwear, and buttocks in full and plain view of the public and passersby.”
During her testimony, Lopez — who took the photos under Stewart’s guidance — told Louis E. Gasperec, one of the Mejia family’s attorneys, that she did not stop to cover parts of Mejia’s body as she photographed them to not “distort evidence by moving her clothes up and down.”
She said this was also the reason she did not cover Mejia’s torso when she was only photographing her wrists, saying protocol was to photograph the entire body.
Mejia died while riding in a Mercedes driven by her ex-boyfriend, Nicholas Sord, who was drunk when he crashed into a pole. The car rolled over in a ditch near 147th Street and Oak Park Avenue in unincorporated Cook County.
Tucker, who lives in Mokena, said she quit her job as a hairdresser because she could no longer handle working in a place where she might hear rumors or potentially have to do the hair of someone participating in those rumors. She said she now works out of her home, taking “only referrals from people we know.”
Mejia’s younger sister, Gabriela Mejia, also testified Thursday about her struggles with the rumors.
“I was a senior in [Jessica’s] high school,” she said, crying. “I went back to school and people would ask me if I knew her clothes were off.”
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She said she would go to the movies and hear “people talking behind me about my sister and that something sexual was going on.”
Sobbing, she shared that she “had to eliminate friends, had to delete Facebook friends, I’ve had to stop reading things. I’ve had to avoid it.”
Mejia’s father, Louis Mejia, held his head in his hand and cried as he listened to Tucker and Gabriela Mejia testify.
Louis Mejia said he was outraged that “innocent people in our communities can be stripped naked in the middle of a ditch.”
“We’ve heard and saw the horror the past three days in this court house,” he said. “My daughter was innocent and now she’s scarred.”
The plaintiff’s attorneys rested their case in the afternoon, then defense attorneys began calling their first witnesses: two sheriff’s officers and a prosecutor who helped convict Sord, now serving a 56-month prison sentence for causing the accident that killed Mejia.
Sheriff’s Det. Robert Ortiz testified to learning upon arriving on the scene that Sord had been making statements that Mejia caused the accident by straddling him, even though Sord admitted to exceeding the legal alcohol limit. Sord was found to have a blood-alcohol content of 0.236, approximately three times the legal limit, at the time of the accident.
Tucker previously said she filed the suit to clear her daughter’s name.
Sheriff’s Officer Tony Wasco, who said he specializes in DUI and collected Sord’s blood and urine samples for testing, testified to smelling a “strong stench of alcohol” from Sord when he visited him at Christ Hospital the morning of the accident.
His testimony supported Ortiz’s claim that Sord had been making allegations about Mejia distracting him from driving, and that the car then “skidded on ice and hit something.”
Asst. Cook County State’s Attorney Nick D’Angelo, who prosecuted Sord, testified that the evidence technicians’ inspection and photos of Mejia’s body showed Sord’s dishonesty and helped convict him.
“Some of the photos directly contradicted [Sord’s] version of how the accident was caused,” he said. “Jessica Mejia did not cause this accident. Sord was responsible for killing her.”
The Mejia family’s other attorney, Perry, suggested to D’Angelo on cross examination that Sord’s clear drunkenness and circumstances surrounding the accident could have been enough to secure a conviction without the photos of Mejia’s body.
Tucker and Gabriela Mejia also testified that the sheriff’s department was not helpful to them, not answering their questions about what happened or providing information that they had to obtain through an attorney — including the photos.
Recounting the moment she first saw the photos at her house, seeing Mejia’s bare body atop “snow and sticks,” Tucker started crying and breathing heavily, wiping her eyes with tissues:
“To see your daughter gone …To see my daughter’s shirt pulled up so far over her head, it was like no respect to her body.”
Tara Kadioglu is a freelance reporter.