Man who survived triple murder recalls living through the ordeal

• Reprints

Deandre Greer

Article Extras

Updated: February 15, 2012 6:38PM

Something in the unexpected knock didn’t sound right, so Terry Martin yelled to his roommate: “Don’t open the door!”

Only she did, and armed men in identical uniforms barreled into the Robbins apartment, shouting and threatening to kill Martin and Carmalita Taylor, Martin recounted for jurors Wednesday.

By the end of the hours-long ordeal that began July 6, 2004, and carried over into the next morning, Taylor, 32, was dead, Martin was left for dead with four gunshot wounds in his head, and two of the three men he testified against Wednesday were on their way to execute Ryan Jernigan and Cameron Young in Chicago.

Samuel Dupree, 40, William Smith, 40, and Deandre Greer, 30, are charged with murdering Taylor, Jernigan and Young, and trying to kill Martin. A fourth defendant, James Massey, has made a plea deal and is expected to testify later in the trial heard by three simultaneous juries in the county courthouse in Markham.

The accused mastermind is Greer, one of Martin’s former roommates; Dupree and Smith are the ones, Martin said, who entered the apartment.

“My employer says I cannot leave you alive. I must kill you,” Dupree, the accused gunman, told Martin. Smith ransacked the place in the 13900 block of South Homan, frantically looking for drugs and cash they believed Jernigan kept there, Martin said.

“Oh God,” Martin said he replied, then Dupree said: “Your God can’t help you now. You should have been praying before I came.”

Holding guns close to her face, they forced Taylor to perform sex acts on them both, then forced Martin to pleasure her or they’d kill them both. They poured paint and other flammable substances on Taylor and Martin, threatening to burn them to death, he testified.

The torture Martin described also included repeated demonstrations by Dupree of how best to shoot his victims by holding a pillow to their heads to muffle the gunfire.

And failing to find any cash or drugs in the apartment save some crumbs of crack Smith immediately smoked, they made both call Jernigan to lure him to the apartment, said Martin, now 45.

“If you get your boy here, I’ll let you live a little while longer,” Martin said Dupree told him.

They called Jernigan, and while waiting for him to show up at the apartment, Dupree spoke to a man on the phone who told him to kill Martin and Taylor, Martin testified, adding he recognized the voice on the other end of the line as Greer’s.

Dupree then knocked him over the head with his gun, and left him on the bed.

When Martin awoke, he didn’t know he’d been shot four times, or that Taylor was already dead in the apartment. He couldn’t stand or walk and managed to crawl headfirst, bleeding badly, down the stairs to the first-floor apartment.

Attorneys for the defendants focused on Martin’s regular use in 2004 of crack cocaine, showing crime scene photos of his crack pipe.

And when Martin picked Dupree’s mugshot out of a photo lineup, he was still recovering from his bullet wounds at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Robert Gevirtz said, still taking heavy painkillers, still depending on tubes running in and out of his body.