Joliet Rainbow Push Prez: 'We Need Justice Now' in Nightmare on Hickory St. Case

Community leaders gathered outside the Will County courthouse and called out for justice in the Nightmare on Hickory Street double murder case a week after one of the four alleged killers copped a plea deal that will spring her from prison in less than four years.

"You know it's a hate crime," Craig Purchase, the president of Rainbow PUSH's Joliet chapter and the pastor of Mount Zion Tabernacle on North Ottawa Street, said during the Thursday afternoon demonstration.

"I'm going to say it again. You know it was a hate crime," Purchase said. "And to say it was anything less is to be compliant."

The two young men slain in the grisly double murder, Eric Glover and Terrance Rankins, both 22, were black. The four who were charged with their murders—Joshua Miner, 25, Alisa Massaro, 20, Bethany McKee, 19, and Adam Landerman, 20—are all white.

Last week Massaro flipped on her three friends and took a plea deal. She got three and a half years in prison in exchange for some day testifying against her alleged accomplices. Amy Sanchez, the president of the Collins Street Neighborhood Council, said she was "disgusted" by the deal.

Activist Robert Hernandez criticized State's Attorney James Glasgow for dropping the murder charges against Massaro and allowing her to plea to robbery and concealing homicides.

"He didn't have any reason to play Monte Hall and make a deal," Hernandez said. "Even without the admissions he had enough to prosecute these individuals."

Glasgow's spokesman, Charles B. Pelkie, said prosecutors discussed the deal with the families of both Rankins and Glover before it was given to Massaro.

"We're not going to sit here and say they were pleased with the disposition but they understood the issues that the state was facing with this particular case," Pelkie said.

"There was a nearly 100 percent certainty that (Massaro's) statement, the statement that she made (to police) would have been suppressed, would not have been used at trial," he said. "This is a constitutional issue. It's no fault of anyone involved in the case. It's an issue that the state absolutely had to deal with in prosecuting Massaro.

"Without her statement, it raised a strong likelihood that the state would not have been able to reach it's burden of proof of reasonable doubt," Pelkie said.

Glover's mother, Nicole Jones, spoke at the demonstration, as did two of her sons and a daughter.

"That girl—it was her house, how could you not know," Jones said of Massaro, who along with McKee reportedly lured Glover and Rankins to her home on Hickory Street in January 2013. Miner and Landerman then allegedly strangled the two men and went through their pockets looking for drugs and money.

Miner and Massaro went on to have sex atop Glover and Rankins' dead bodies, according to police reports obtained exclusively by Patch.

"She knew, she knew what happened to my son and his friend Terrance," Jones said. "She knew what happened and it makes me angry that she can sit up there and smile on a picture, and that other goofy one, that he can sit up there and smile, 'Oh we're going to get away with it.' You ain't got away with nothing because God's going to get you."

Pelkie said prosecutors weren't pleased by Massaro's cheery prison mug either.

"We understand and we sympathize with the Glover family's anger at Massaro's behavior and what they perceive as her callous attitude after this disposition," he said. "We understand that and we sympathize but we can't control if she smiles during a booking photo. We don't like it when we see any defendant smiling in a booking photo."

Glover's younger brother Drakkar Williams spoke of how hard it is for his mother to attend court hearings and see the alleged murderers smiling in the jury box, and recalled how the four accused killers reportedly carried on after the slayings.

"They kept partying," he said. "It was written in the Joliet Patch, right? They kept partying."

Purchase called for Miner, McKee and Landerman to be "prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law."

"We need justice now," said Purchase, who added, "Mr. Glasgow, if this was your child, would you make a plea?"

The demonstration ended with the group chanting, "No justice, no peace."

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