A motorist who hit two teenagers while driving together on a scooter almost three years ago was admitted during a phone call in prison, while they were consistent with her son making an alibi, say officers of justice.
The Chicago police have worked on identifying the driver of the Black Kia Soul who hit the two 15-year-olds in the 2800-block of South Kedzie since the crash took place on the evening of 2 September 2022. CPD even released a supervisory picture of the car, but the case remained open for years.
Now public prosecutors have sued 39-year-old Linda Perea in connection with the case.
They said she was sitting on her phone when she collided with the boy and the girl when she rode on the Gotrax Electric Scooter around 8 p.m., she kept driving after she hit them and then briefly stopped at a gas station where a stranger helped her to expel the mutilated scooter, said officers of justice.
She never tried to help the children, nor reported the accident, according to the allegations. The girl suffered from a broken elbow and broken knee, while the boy broke his collarbone, said a CPD report.
In the years since the crash, Perea was caught on tape when she discussed that she manufactured an alibi with her son while he was in the Cook County prison, officials said. Jailhouse calls are routinely recorded and those conversations played a key role in the police investigation, according to the court applications.
The recordings showed her: ‘schedule to think of and lie fake alibis[s] around the [criminal] Justice trial, “judge James Murphy III wrote in a detention warrant.
Officers of Justice accused her of two counts of leaving the scene of an accident with injury and two counts of not reporting an accident with injury.
Murphy granted the State’s detention Petition and said that although those charges are not explicitly mentioned as determined crimes under the SAFE-T-Act, PEREA is eligible for detention under the ‘rest clause’. That is an everyday provision that enables judges to prison the defendants in a crime “who entails the threat of or inflicting great physical damage or permanent disability or malformation.”
