(CHICAGO) A man accused of fatally beating his grandmother, a Chicago Police officer, when she caught him skipping school as a teen was sentenced to 23 years in prison Tuesday.
Keshawn Perkins was 15 when he was arrested for the Nov. 4, 2011, murder of his grandmother, Hester Scott, at their home in the 8800 block of South Wallace, the Chicago Sun-Times reported at the time.
Perkins, now 19, pleaded guilty Tuesday to one count of first-degree murder at a hearing before Judge Clayton Crane, who handed down the 23-year sentence, court records show.
Prosecutors claimed Perkins erupted in a rage when Scott caught him skipping school, asleep in front of the TV in their basement. He hit her repeatedly in the head with a lamp, then stabbed her multiple times with a kitchen knife, severing her jugular vein, authorities said.
Perkins was spotted fleeing from the home and was arrested soon after, the Sun-Times reported. He told police where he had dumped his grandmother’s body and hidden his own bloody clothes, and two bloody kitchen knives were recovered from the basement.
Scott — a mother of two — had adopted Keshawn and his siblings after her drug-addicted daughter could no longer care for them and they were taken into foster care, relatives told the Chicago Sun-Times.
Friends and relatives described Scott as a proud police officer who, less than a day before her death, swore she would “fight till my dying breath” to help Perkins turn his life around.
Relatives said her world collapsed when the teen accused her of abuse in 2007. Even though the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services dismissed the allegations, an Independent Police Review Authority investigation was still open at the time of her death four years later, and she had remained on desk duty, stripped of her police powers.
Police Supt. Garry McCarthy ordered Scott’s badge to be posthumously restored to her for her burial, at the urging of police union officials.
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