Prosecutors on Sunday charged an Englewood man with beating a woman to death in the abandoned house where she and her teenage son were living earlier this month.
Antwon Chambers met Terryn Winters, 34, a few weeks before he allegedly killed her, Assistant State’s Attorney Eugene Wood said. Chambers, 32, had been living in an Englewood halfway house a few blocks from Winters and her son following a 12-year prison sentence for criminal sexual assault. State prison records show that he was paroled in March. Chambers is also listed on the Illinois State Police’s registry of sex offenders.
Winters’ 14-year-old son, Daryn Stanton, had been the first to call for help on Dec. 8 when he couldn’t find his mother in the vacant home where they’d been living on the 7000 block of South Normal Boulevard. Police found Winters dead in the house’s attic the next day.
On Sunday afternoon, Daryn sat wedged between his aunt and uncle with his hands in his lap as a prosecutor read out murder charges against Chambers during his first appearance at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse.
As Wood spoke, Winters’ twin brother wrapped his arm around Daryn and rested a hand on his head in the back row of bond court.
Police found a pipe wrench next to Winters’ body and a gray hat and blood splatter in her bedroom, Wood said. Chambers appeared on surveillance footage from nearby buildings wearing the hat as he entered the house with Winters the morning of Dec. 8, and later leaving alone and without the hat.
Wood said police found Winters’ phone in a nearby alley two days after her death. The phone contained two pictures of her body, a $7 cash transfer from Winters to Chambers and Chambers’ contact information had been deleted, he said.
Wood said Winters’ phone had been found with a purple case. On Thursday, the day police arrested Chambers, Daryn stared at his new phone, facedown on the table in his uncle’s Near South Side condo. He’d gotten a purple case to be like Winters, he said.
He was blunt about what he needed right then: “My mom,” he said. “I feel like I’m not really feeling my true scope of emotions, like I’ve dissociated from them.”
Winters was kind and always laughing, he said. She had a quick temper, especially “if you acted pretentious,” and loved multicolored hair and eyelashes and makeup. She usually wore a purple cross around her neck. She was a morning person. Daryn said they went almost everywhere together, though he was “more of a homebody” than she was.
He estimated they stayed in the abandoned house for about three months after Winters lost her job. They had to be careful about parts of the house crumbling, especially when it rained. They’d wash up and charge their phones at friends’ houses, her son said.
Winters had been pulling the materials together to apply for an apartment in Indiana, he said. He was eager to get out of there but hadn’t been worried about their safety.
Winters’ older sister Tanika Jackson, who also attended the court hearing with her brother and his wife, had been concerned. Winters had always “bumped heads with people,” but Jackson, 45, was worried about the two of them riding out Chicago’s winter in the abandoned building.
“I begged her to come stay with us,” she said. “She said, ‘No, I’m OK. We’re fine.’”
Jackson plans to take Daryn, who’s in the middle of eighth grade and wants to be a veterinarian, to live with her in Moline. Daryn said that plan suited him.
“I don’t want to be in Chicago anymore,” he said. “The bad memories suppress the good memories.”
Judge Shauna Boliker on Sunday ordered Chambers held pending trial, citing “the brutality of the circumstances” and the short time between when Winters and Chambers met and her death. Chambers is next set to appear in court Tuesday.
Daryn put his hood up as he left bond court. He walked separately with his head bowed as his family talked quietly with a victim witness. His aunt reached over and put her arm around him. He kept his hood up.
