BY LAUREN FITZPATRICK AND RUMMANA HUSSAIN Staff Reporters April 25, 2012 12:42PM
Updated: April 25, 2012 1:18PM
Neither Jennifer Hudson nor her sister were in court Wednesday as a Cook County pathologist gave the grisly details of the murder of Hudson’s nephew.
Dr. Mitra Kalelkar, who did the autopsy of 7-year-old Julian King on Oct. 28, 2008, testified in the third day of the murder trial of William Balfour, Hudson’s sister’s ex-husband who is accused of killing the boy, along with Hudson’s mother and brother.
The boy weighed 94 pounds and was 56 inches tall, Kalelkar told a hushed audience in Judge Charles Burns’ courtroom. She said the boy died of gunshot wounds, and she ruled his murder a homicide.
She said the first bullet went through the boy’s scalp, while the second one tore through his brain.
Kalelkar, who testified as multiple autopsy photos were displayed in court, said the bullet “fractured the skull, severely lacerated the brain and came out from the left side of the face.” That one badly fractured his skull, she said.
The autopsy photos of Julian were so gruesome that Balfour would not look at them.
Julian was found in the clothes his mother, Julia, said he had slept in when she testified Monday. Kalelkar said Julian was wearing a white T-shirt, black shorts and flip flops.
Kalelkar said the boy did not show signs of rigor mortis when he was found Oct. 27 in the backseat of a car on the West Side. Because rigor mortis typically goes away after 36 hours, Kalelkar estimated that the boy had been dead between 36 and 72 hours when he was found.
Hudson’s mother and brother had been killed on the morning of Oct. 24, and Balfour was arrested later that night at a girlfriend’s house, police said.
On cross-examination of Kalelkar, Balfour’s defense attorneys pressed that timeline, since if the boy had only been dead for 36 hours when he was found, he couldn’t have been killed by Balfour, who was in custody at the time.
After Kalelkar left the stand, Jennifer and Julia Hudson came into the courtroom.
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