Degorski gets life in Brown's slayings

Comments (...)

E-mail this story

Print this story

Comments

Share

CHICAGO – A former handyman convicted of killing seven people during a robbery at a suburban Chicago fast-food restaurant in 1993 has been sentenced to life in prison.

Thirty-seven-year-old James Degorski was sentenced Wed­nesday. A jury convicted him last month in the deaths of seven at Brown’s Chicken and Pasta Restaurant in Palatine in 1993.

The same jury recommended that Degorski be sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Ten jurors had wanted to sentence him to death, but two refused. A death penalty verdict must be unanimous.

The restaurant’s owners and five employees were shot and stabbed and their bodies stacked in a walk-in cooler and freezer during a botched January 1993 robbery that netted less than $2,000.

During the sentencing phase of the trial, witnesses, including Patricia Degorski, told jurors that James Degorski grew up in a home with a violent, sexually abusive father who would occasionally tie his children to a bedpost to beat them.

But Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Tom Biesty said Degorski showed no mercy toward the victims: restaurant own­ers Richard Ehlenfeldt, 50, his wife, Lynn Ehlenfeldt, 49, and employees Michael Castro, 16, Rico Solis, 17, Marcus Nellsen, 31, Thomas Mennes, 32, and Guadalupe Maldonado, 46.

Comments