Brown's Chicken massacre

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The Brown's Chicken massacre is the popular name for a mass murder which occurred at a Brown's Chicken restaurant in Palatine, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago in the United States in 1993.

On January 8, 1993, seven people were slain at the Brown's Chicken and Pasta in Palatine. The victims included the owners, Richard E. Ehlenfeldt, 50, and his wife, Lynn W., 49, of Arlington Heights, Illinois. Also slain were five employees: Guadalupe Maldonado, 46, of Palatine, the cook; Michael C. Castro, 16, and Rico L. Solis, 17, both Palatine High School students working there part-time; and Palatine residents Thomas Mennes, 32, and Marcus Nellsen, 31.

When Palatine police (PPD) found the bodies, it was more than 5 1/2 hours after the 9 p.m. closing. Parents of one employee had called police, concerned that their son had not returned home from work.

When officers arrived at the store, they spotted the rear door open at the restaurant at 168 W. Northwest Highway. Inside, they found the seven bodies, some face down, in a cooler and in a walk-in refrigerator.

The building no longer exists. It was razed in April, 2001, after housing a dry cleaning establishment, then standing vacant for several years with its dark windows marked with Xs. The site is currently a parking lot for Eurofresh, a store specializing in imported groceries.

[edit] Current suspects

In March of 2002, more than nine years later, Anne Lockett, an ex-girlfriend of one of the killers, implicated her former boyfriend James Degorski and his associate Juan Luna in the crime. In April of 2002, PPD obtained a DNA sample from one suspect, and matched it to a sample of saliva found on a piece of partially-eaten chicken found in the garbage the night of the shooting.

The PPD took the two suspects, one of them a former employee of the restaurant, into custody on May 16, 2002. The pair, who met at Palatine's Fremd High School, are currently awaiting trial. The trial has been delayed as defense attorneys have requested to examine data from the computers used to establish the DNA match between Luna and the chicken. The computers containing this data may since have been auctioned off as surplus.

On March 30, 2007, the Chicago Tribune reported that jury selection in the trial had begun.[1]