Brian Peck bristled when Cook County prosecutors described him as having killed his mother.
“I didn’t kill her,” the 59-year-old Elgin man said this week during his trial on first-degree murder charges. “She died accidentally after she attacked me with a knife.”
Peck took the stand for nearly four hours Monday, testifying on his own behalf before the case went to closing arguments and jury deliberations Tuesday.
Peck said the incident began about 3:30 a.m. Oct. 25, 2017, when his mother called him to her bedroom in the Elgin home they shared and they argued over $180,000 in federal benefits he was seeking for providing years of medical care to his mother.
Gail Peck was angry because she wanted him to give her half of the money, her son said.
When he told her he needed the money for his debt collection business, the 76-year-old woman grabbed a military-style knife she kept in her room and said, “Then what the (expletive) do I need you for?” as she tried to stab him, Peck said.
He stood up in the witness box to demonstrate how he said he sidestepped a lunge from his mother and then knocked her to the ground, putting his shoe on her head and pushed it to the floor with “a stomping motion,” Peck said. His mother responded by stabbing him in the shin so he placed his foot on her throat and pressed down until she relented, he said.
When he realized his mother was not breathing, he tried performing CPR, he said.
“I’ve seen it on TV a million times,” he said.
Peck then described how he used a handsaw to dismember his mother’s body in the guest bathroom, placing her remains in luggage and disposing them along the Lake Michigan shoreline in Chicago on consecutive nights.
A fisherman at the Lincoln Park lagoon snagged the duffel bag containing Gail Peck’s legs, and Chicago police later recovered a suitcase with other body parts. Peck had reported his mother missing to Elgin police two days after the alleged murder.
In his testimony, Peck said he did not think police would believe his account of self-defense so he didn’t immediately call them. He had been charged two other times with domestic abuse against his mother, but police refused to believe she had attacked him in both instances, he said.
Clifford Ward is a freelance reporter for The Courier-News.
