Academy Award winning actress Jennifer Hudson’s brother didn’t have an enemy in the world, save one man, the brother’s close friend testified Thursday.
“Did he have any enemies?” Kent Williams, a good friend of Jason Hudson, was asked Thursday during his testimony.
“Beside that cat sitting over there? No,” Williams said, pointing to defendant William Balfour.
Balfour, 30, is accused of fatally shooting Hudson’s brother, Jason, 29, her mother, Darnell Donerson, 57, and her nephew, Julian King, 7, after learning his estranged wife, Julia Hudson, was ready to end their relationship.
Although some witnesses previously testified they saw Balfour with Jason Hudson’s gun, his fingerprints were not found on the .45-caliber murder weapon or on any item located near the crime scenes, according to two fingerprint specialists who testified during the second week of the high-profile trial at the Cook County Criminal Courthouse.
But the experts also noted that very few usable latent prints were recovered from the evidence, including items from Jason Hudson’s stolen SUV where Julian’s body was discovered on the West Side on Oct. 27, 2008.
Even the broom that some said Donerson may have used to fend off her attacker did not have a usable fingerprint, said Anastasia Petruncio, a DEA expert who was working for the Illinois State Police at the time she conducted her tests.
Petruncio also said environmental factors such as rain could have washed away fingerprint residue.
Many of the usable prints extracted from the stolen SUV were identified as belonging to Jason Hudsons’ friends – many of who testified that they often were in the vehicle.
Williams, himself, said he had been in white SUV hundreds of times.
The 27-year-old man, who quietly wept on the stand, burying his hands in his face, told Assistant State’s Attorney James McKay that when he got the news that Donerson’s and Jason Hudson’s bodies were found in their home, it was the “worst thing” he heard in his life.
He remembered rushing to the 7000 block of South Yale with Jennifer Hudson’s former boyfriend. “That’s my family,” he said, recalling the afternoon of Oct. 24, 2008. “I needed to see what’s going on with my people.”