A northern Illinois woman who beat her young son for most of his life and padlocked him in his bedroom where he died alone in …
A northern Illinois woman who beat her young son for most of his life and padlocked him in his bedroom where he died alone in the dark, his head bearing the outlines of the shower head she struck him with, on Thursday portrayed herself as a loving mother as she begged for mercy from the judge who will sentence her for murder.
“I had the privilege of having AJ as my son,” JoAnn Cunningham said of 5-year-old Andrew “AJ” Freund.
Cunningham pleaded guilty in December to killing AJ, eight months after his body was found wrapped in plastic in a shallow grave near the family’s Crystal Lake home. “I loved him, I miss him,” she told McHenry County Judge Robert Wilbrandt.
Sounding like a grieving mother whose child was killed by someone else, she described AJ’s love of doughnuts with sprinkles and his habit of toting a briefcase because he wanted to be a lawyer. Cunningham addressed only in the vaguest of terms her son’s killing, choosing instead to describe her own difficult life.
“I am living proof of what physical and mental abuse can create,” she sobbed.
Her tearful comments stood in stark contrast to the testimony heard earlier Thursday, when the prosecutor presented evidence of the almost unimaginable physical and emotional abuse Cunningham inflicted on AJ for years, until last year when the boy, his brain swelling, choking on his own blood, died.
“She had beaten this little boy to the edge of death,… locked in his room [where] he had to endure the bleak process of death all by himself,” said McHenry County State’s Attorney Patrick Kenneally.
