“I held her and said: Wake up, baby, wake up”: Murder victim's grandma

LOCKPORT – On October 2, 2020, Shirley Onderisin was at her home in Lockport discussing her Bible study with one of her friends when her oldest granddaughter suddenly became distressed. Onderisin's 32-year-old daughter Ashtin Eaton said something terrible had just happened, the sixth-grader alerted her grandmother.

The morning her daughter and younger granddaughter were found, “I heard my granddaughter FaceTime on the first day of the Lockport double murder trial of 30-year-old defendant Anthony Maggio.

Maggio and Ashtin Eaton worked together at Amazon's Joliet facility, where they became romantically involved and later had a child together, prosecutors said. According to the witness statements, Maggio was already engaged to another woman with whom he had two small children.

During her granddaughter's frantic FaceTime chat, Onderisin told jurors: “I said, 'Let me see your mother.'” She pointed the iPad at her mother. I saw my daughter and she looked bad. So I told her to call 911.”

Onderisin and her husband then ran to their car and also called 911.

Will County Assistant Prosecutor Ashley Kwasneski asked what she saw when she entered the apartment's kitchen.

“My daughter,” she testified.

“What did she look like?” Kwasneski followed.

“A little blue in the face,” she replied. “Her left wrist was injured. She was lying on the floor… There was a knife to her right.”

Onderisin testified that she did not touch or pick up the knife.

Then Lockport's grandmother began to cry as the prosecutor showed a photo of her murdered daughter, Ashtin.

The prosecutor later asked Onderisin about the discovery of her 14-month-old granddaughter, Hazel.

“I was looking for the baby,” she testified. “I went into the bedroom where they usually slept.”

There, on top of the bed, Onderisin found little Hazel.

“She was surrounded by blankets,” Onderisin testified. “She was like she was tucked into the blankets. Her head was kind of stuck in the side.”

Onderisin remembered reaching into the bed and picking Hazel up.

“I was hoping she would…” Onderisin testified, beginning to cry. “I held her and said, ‘Wake up, baby! Wake up!' I ran into the living room because paramedics were there and said, 'Please save her! Please save her!'”

At this point, the prosecutor showed the jury a piece of evidence that was the bed in which little Hazel was found. Someone had suffocated her.

“Where I found the body is Ashtin’s bed,” Hazel’s grandmother told jurors. “There’s this big brown blanket in the middle. She looked like a cocoon. When I picked her up, I just put her on my shoulder.”

At 14 months, Hazel “learned to walk. She chased me around a few times. I helped give birth to her.”

Finally, prosecutors turned their attention to Anthony Maggio, the defendant in the Lockport double murder. The trainee paramedic is accused of suffocating Hazel and strangling his ex-girlfriend and then staging their deaths as suicide.

Maggio's jury heard from Onderisin that Maggio did not show up at the hospital for the birth of little Hazel.

The prosecutor wanted to know how often Onderisin had interacted with Maggio during little Hazel's 14 months of life.

“How many times have you seen Anthony Maggio in person?” Kwasneski asked her witness.

“One time,” she testified.

During opening arguments, Maggio's private defense attorney, Michael Clancy of Chicago, told jurors that his client was innocent of the double murders.

Clancy also suspected that Ashtin Eaton's T-shirt, which she was wearing at the time of her murder, contained the DNA of four different men.

In the weeks before the murders, Onderisin testified, her daughter had not seen any men.

“Any men?” asked the prosecutor.

“No,” she repeated. “She was talking about getting another job.”

The night before the murders, Ashtin Eaton stopped at her parents' home in Lockport after finishing her job at Amazon. They only lived about six or seven blocks away.

During Tuesday's trial, Clancy tried to insinuate that Ashtin Eaton was drinking glasses of wine at her mother's house, but the witness immediately put the defense attorney to task.

“That was me,” Onderisin told Maggio’s lawyer. “I had a few glasses of wine. She didn’t like my wine.”

Onderisin's crying comment was the only time there was laughter in Will County Judge Amy Bertani-Tomczak's courtroom.

Most of the crowded benches in the gallery were filled with about two dozen friends and family members of the Lockport murder victims. As photos of the mother and daughter's bodies were shown on a large television monitor in the courtroom, some of the relatives wept openly and stormed out of the courtroom full of emotion.

At one point, Judge Amy Bertani-Tomczak dismissed the jury for a few minutes to admonish the gallery, hoping to keep her courtroom as quiet as possible during testimony.

Finally, Clancy asked whether Ashtin's mother was responsible for touching the bedding in which her 14-month-old granddaughter was found.

“I didn't touch the bedding, but I picked the baby up from it,” she replied.

Clancy also wondered if Lockport's grandmother handled the knife found next to her adult daughter's body. She insisted she didn't.

“I was right there,” she continued. “That’s my baby.”

Sixth grader finds her mother's body in 2020

Jessica Eaton, now 15, was the first witness to testify for the prosecution in the double murder trial on Tuesday. Jessica was in sixth grade when her mother and little sister were murdered.

Due to COVID, Jessica completed her sixth grade classes from home via Zoom. Jessica described herself as a healthy sleeper. She couldn't remember any loud noises or strange noises during the night hours when her mother and sister were killed by the intruder.

Jessica estimated that she went to sleep around 11 p.m. and woke up around 8:45 a.m

“I looked at the time on my iPad,” the Lockport High School sophomore testified. “I left my bunk bed and looked into my mother's room to see if she was there. I saw my sister’s butt with blankets in the air.”

Jessica thought her little sister was sleeping without realizing she was killed.

As for her mother: “I thought she was cooking breakfast. So I went back to the kitchen. I saw blood on the floor. She was on the floor, laying there. She was lying on the floor with blood on her arms. It was blue and purple.”

Jessica told the jury: “I touched her breast.”

Her mother lay there motionless. The prosecutor asked if her mother showed any signs of movement or breathing.

Jessica answered no to both questions.

“There was a knife right next to her,” Jessica said. “I ran and got my iPad.”

After alerting her grandparents to her mother's emergency, “they told me to call the police.”

Since Jessica didn't have her own phone, she ran to neighbors' apartments, banging on doors and screaming for help.

Prosecutors asked Jessica whether her mother had been with any man in the weeks before her murder.

“No boys came over,” she replied.

Anthony Maggio, now 30, shaved his beard for this week's double murder trial.

Although most Will County criminal judges regularly allow the media access to photographs for reporting on criminal trials, Maggio's criminal defense attorney Michael Clancy convinced Judge Amy Bertani-Tomczak, Will County's longest-serving judge, not to allow news cameras in her courtroom 405 for Maggio's double murder trial.

The trial is expected to take at least two, possibly three weeks.

Related Patch Coverage:

Lockport mother and baby Hazel killed over child support: prosecutors