Facing up to 60 years for killing her 5-year-old, mom tells court: 'I miss him and there's nothing I wouldn't do to bring him back'

CHICAGO — Near the top of a small hill in a Palatine cemetery rests the remains of a 5-year-old boy buried in Superman pajamas and in a casket handmade and blessed by Trappist monks.

Etched in the flat marker is the image of a praying angel and the words, “Loving Brother Andrew Freund.” The nickname “AJ” appears in the center of a Superman emblem on the top right side.

There is no mention on the stone of his parents, both accused of murdering their little boy in a case that provoked a maelstrom of public outcry due to its cruelty and also repeated failures by the state’s child welfare system to intervene.

On Thursday, McHenry County Judge Robert Wilbrandt began hearing evidence to determine society’s punishment for the child’s mother.

JoAnn Cunningham faces 20 to 60 years in prison for fatally abusing her son in April 2019.

The 37-year-old Crystal Lake woman had long maintained her innocence. She even appeared on national television pleading for the public’s help after the boy’s father reported AJ missing. Later, after AJ’s battered body was found and charges were filed, she emphatically denied involvement.

But in December, after prosecutors confronted her with a mountain of damning evidence, including newly disclosed cellphone video footage of an earlier attack on the boy, Cunningham pleaded guilty to first-degree murder.

At the end of Thursday’s court hearing, Cunningham spoke for about seven minutes. In a tearful oratory before the podium, holding handwritten notes, she begged for mercy and said she would “give my life” to get AJ back.

“I had the pride of having AJ as a son,” she said, describing his birth as “one of the happiest days of my life.”

“I loved him. I miss him and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to bring him back.”

Cunningham said being a mother “defines me” and gave her a purpose in life. She described AJ as handsome, smart, funny, driven, special and “absolutely loved.”

She said AJ wanted to be a doctor or gas station attendant or garbage man or own the local doughnut shop.

“He was convinced along with all of us that he could be whatever he wanted to be,” she said.

Without ever saying she killed him, she admitted to making “heartless choices,” and said that drugs were a Band-Aid to her lifelong feelings of being “unloved, forgotten and rejected.”

“I will never be able to justify anything, nor will I ever want to,” she said.

She continued, “My heart and my mind are consumed with pain, sadness and extreme remorse.”

Cunningham said, “As much as I deserve punishment, I believe I deserve help. Please help me.”

In exchange for her guilty plea, prosecutors dropped related, lesser charges. McHenry County State’s Attorney Patrick Kenneally said he will seek the maximum punishment. Cunningham will be required to serve 100% of her sentence.

Cunningham, wearing orange jail garb and a mask, her hair braided, kept her head mostly lowered as prosecutors Thursday morning showed graphic photos of her battered son and played cellphone video clips depicting some of the abuse.

At times, as the video rolled, she wiped away tears and blew her nose. The television monitor was faced toward the judge, so Cunningham and others in the courtroom gallery could not see the images. But audio of her berating the boy was piped through the courtroom and an overflow room where the media, FBI agents who investigated the boy’s disappearance and members of the public viewed the proceedings.

A few members of AJ’s family left the courtroom before the videos were played.

A prosecution witness, Dr. JoEllen Channon, testified about a large bruise on AJ’s hip she had examined Dec. 18, 2018, just four months before he died. Channon said when she interviewed AJ alone about the cause of the bruise, his story shifted and the child suggested his mother was responsible.

“Maybe (mommy) didn’t mean to hurt me,” she said, quoting the boy.

Concerned that further prodding by her would compromise the investigation, Channon said she concluded AJ needed to be questioned by a trained forensic interviewer and examined by a child-abuse pediatrician. She notified state child welfare officials, but Channon said the investigator told her none were available.

“We did not want AJ to leave with JoAnn (Cunningham) that day,” Channon testified.

Two Crystal Lake police officers also testified about the dilapidated, filthy condition of the family’s home in December 2018 and also months later on the day AJ was reported missing.

Cunningham and the boy’s father, Andrew Freund, were charged April 24, 2019, after AJ’s body was discovered in a shallow grave following a frantic, six-day search. The case against Freund, 61, who remains in custody, is pending. He is due in court July 30.

Wilbrandt is not expected to announce Cunningham’s punishment until Friday afternoon.

Most of the evidence presented during the morning’s testimony had been made public already during earlier court hearings and through media coverage.

But prosecutors revealed some new video footage and text messages that showed Cunningham’s attempts to cover up the crime days after AJ had been killed.

In April 18, 2019, video footage at the police station taken after Freund reported AJ missing, Cunningham softly prays while alone in the interview room before a Crystal Lake police officer enters the room.

“Dear Father, please make sure AJ is safe and he comes home,” she said, her hands clasped in prayer.

At times tearful, she pleads with police to find AJ before something bad happens to him because there’s “many creeps out there.”

“He’s got to be so scared,” she said of AJ, later asking the officer to make sure someone is at her home “in case he comes home.”

When the officer asks her if he can get Cunningham anything, she replied, “My son.”

Also, in text messages between AJ’s parents over the 72 hours before he was reported missing, Cunningham and Freund act as if he was still alive, including when the mother said AJ was having a good day.

“He’s such a charmer when he’s good,” she texted Freund, days after the boy’s April 15, 2019, slaying. “Lots of hugs.”

Earlier Thursday morning, a small group of protesters from ROAR for AJ assembled outside the courthouse in Woodstock, urging the maximum sentence. They decorated the outskirts of the courthouse with blue balloons and signs with messages that screamed, “No mercy” and “Justice for AJ.”

The lead organizer, Tracy Kotzman, said the boy’s tragic death still resonates in the community.

“I feel like 20 years would be another punch in the face for AJ,” she said outside of court before the sentencing hearing began. “We would expect the max.”

She continued, “It was brutal and heinous and, in our community, it’s just not something we’re used to. I mean, you should never get used to it anywhere but, here, it was just shocking.”

Prosecutors earlier said they found a March 27, 2019, video from Cunningham’s cellphone in which she is seen grabbing the boy by his throat and pushing him against a bathroom wall until he chokes for air. AJ has visible cuts and bruises on his face and forehead, according to prosecutors. Cunningham had cornered him after AJ remarked he was going to get her in trouble with “someone.”

On the video, prosecutors said, AJ is heard telling his parents he loves his family. Cunningham responds, “Bull----, you don’t show it.” She continues to taunt him, asking the boy if he thinks his parents and younger brother “do evil in this house,” to which AJ says, “no, just me.” At one point, after AJ said, “I just don’t want a family,” Cunningham responds to her 5-year-old son that he does not have one.

The video is in addition to one from March 4, 2019, also recovered from Cunningham’s cellphone, in which, prosecutors said, she is heard berating the badly beaten boy.

Prosecutors have said Cunningham filmed the first cellphone video in AJ’s bedroom to send to Freund, who was at work. It’s unclear why the couple filmed the later one taken inside the bathroom in which AJ is choked and both parents were present.

Prosecutors provided evidence from AJ’s autopsy, which has not been made public. Besides fatal head injuries and cuts and bruises across his body and limbs, the child inhaled his own blood before his painful death and had small, circular marks on his forehead consistent with the pattern of a detachable shower head.

Throughout his short life, AJ was the subject of many police and child welfare contacts. The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services took him into protective custody at birth after AJ was born in October 2013 with heroin in his system. The unwed couple got the boy back when he was about 20 months old and remained sober until 2018, when DCFS responded to a handful of hotline calls, including two when AJ had suspicious bruising.

In what was an emotional moment in the proceedings, Cunningham’s paternal cousin told the judge about the impact of losing AJ. She raised the boy for nearly two years and hoped to adopt him but instead was forced to return the boy to his parents in June 2015 after they became sober and complied with other court orders.

The woman, who is raising AJ’s two younger siblings, a 5-year-old brother and nearly 14-month-old sister, has asked not to be publicly identified.

“He was a beautiful, perfect little boy who was loving and fun, caring and compassionate,” she said through tears. “(AJ) loved to play and do puzzles. He was just the perfect little boy.”

Cunningham also has an older son, 20, who is in college, but he did not attend Thursday’s court proceedings. His grandmother, Lori Hughes, who won custody of him in 2013 after a hard-fought court battle against her daughter, with whom she is estranged, was in court but did not testify.

Cunningham’s attorneys, Rick Behof and Angelo Mourelatos, requested after her guilty plea that she receive a psychological, psychiatric and substance abuse evaluation prior to this week’s sentencing. In the hearing’s mitigation phase, they presented evidence of her difficult life, including that she has been in abusive relationships and suffered repeated losses, especially the 2001 suicide of her only sibling, Joseph, 21, with whom she was close.

As a young mother, Cunningham was devoted to her firstborn child for the first several years of his life and even was a licensed foster parent for a brief time in 2011 for another boy. But, according to public records, her life had begun to unravel not long afterward amid a volatile 2012 divorce and the protracted custody battle with her mother in 2013.

Cunningham has been diagnosed with depression and had a prescription drug addiction that spiraled into drug use, especially heroin, after she became involved in early 2012 with Freund, who is nearly 25 years her senior and was her divorce attorney.

Cunningham and Freund got clean of heroin to regain custody of AJ but, records showed, their sobriety did not last, leaving them unable to pay bills or provide a safe home for their children. Their history includes multiple police and child welfare hotline calls, a filthy house, domestic violence and misdemeanor arrests.

Prosecutors said that Freund, in recounting the final, fatal incident of abuse, told them that on April 14, 2019, Cunningham engaged in “some hitting” and AJ was placed in a cold shower. Freund said AJ was forced to stay in the cold water until he would admit the truth about hiding his soiled underwear.

Freund described watching Cunningham question AJ in the shower as “she was like taking the spray nozzle thing and putting it like right in his face. Sometimes lose his balance and fall in the tub,” according to prosecutors. Cunningham awoke Freund at 3 a.m. April 15, 2019, to tell him AJ, who had been sent to bed earlier, was not breathing.

The couple searched for information on child CPR on Freund’s phone and, after realizing AJ was dead, Freund told Cunningham he would “handle it,” placing AJ’s body in a plastic tote in the basement and burying him days later, according to prosecutors.

After six days of searching, the child was found in a shallow grave, wrapped in plastic, about 7 miles from his home.

Relatives have described the boy as inquisitive and bright who loved Thomas the Tank Engine, puzzles, books and his brothers. He also loved superheroes, especially Superman.

In the Palatine cemetery, the boy’s headstone also includes the words, “Our precious little hero.”

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