Could we have prevented  a teenager’s brutal murder?

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Updated: December 13, 2011 8:27AM

The brutal murder of 14-year-old Kelli O’Laughlin in her own home horrified people across Illinois and throughout the country. I could not help thinking about my own 15-year-old daughter while reading and watching the news of the vicious attack.

As a father, I felt despair when I learned that Kelli had come home from school and met her death at the hands of a lifelong criminal. I thought of my own daughter coming home after school while my wife and I were at work. I cannot fathom the horror Kelli’s mother felt when she found Kelli’s body in the kitchen.

We all know that John L. Wilson, 38, has been charged with first-degree murder and burglary. He was ordered held without bond last Friday. Wilson allegedly stabbed Kelli repeatedly with a carving knife that he found in the kitchen. Later, according to prosecutors, he used Kelli’s own cell phone to send text messages of a “taunting and disturbing” nature to Kelli’s mother.

And it was this savagery and cruelty, I want to believe, that drew so much public attention to this one murder. Not the fact, I sure hope, that it happened at a good address.

The reaction among students and parents in the area was so swift and deep.

Paola Fuentes, an eighth-grader at St. Cletus Catholic School in La Grange, had met Kelli briefly at a local party. “We talked about school and sports,” Paola remembered. “She was sweet.”

Now, Paola said, she felt “just sick.”

A question: What was Wilson doing out on the streets? Here’s this parolee who spent 17 of 20 years in prison for a long list of violent crimes — the kind of stuff that’s like prep work for murder.

In 1993, Wilson was sentenced to seven years for aggravated vehicular hijacking. In 2001, he was convicted of aggravated battery. At the time of the murder, he was free on parole after serving eight years of an 11-year sentence for felony robbery.

At what point do the authorities consider a violent criminal like Wilson a danger to others?

In Wilson’s case, that had to be a long time ago.

Did anybody see a pattern in Wilson’s behavior that might indicate a potential for the most extreme violence?

Who decided to let Wilson out on parole?

These are the questions of a concerned father who saw in Kelli O’Laughlin a little bit of his own daughter — the same hopes and dreams and possibilities.

My heart, like your heart, goes out to her family.

A murder like this, I must admit, shakes my conviction about the wrongness of the death penalty. And since Kelli’s murder, I’ve heard plenty of calls to bring the death penalty back in Illinois.

But there is no real evidence that the death penalty deters potential murderers.

And executing Kelli’s killer would not bring Kelli back.

It will have to be enough that Kelli’s killer, whether Wilson or somebody else, rots in jail.