*The getaway driver involved in the shooting death of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton has been sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Pendleton’s 2013 killing in Chicago drew the attention of then-President Barack Obama.
As reported by NBC News, Hadiya had just taken her final exams at the King College Prep High School, and was walking home from when she and another classmate took cover from the rain at a nearby park. That’s where prosecutors said, Micheail Ward, got out of a car driven by Kenneth Williams and opened fire at who he thought were rival gang members.
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Hadiya Pendleton’s parents, Cleopatra Cowley (center) & Nathaniel Pendleton Sr. (left), walk with supporters into the Leighton Criminal Courthouse, where a judge will sentence the man who drove the 15yo girl’s killer away from the park where she was shot more than 8 years ago. pic.twitter.com/RND2Qr2UWL
— Ashlee Rezin (@Ashlee_Rezin) July 20, 2021
“She was 15 years old. She loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss. She was a majorette. She was so good to her friends, they all thought they were her best friend,” Obama said during his State of the Union address that same year.
“Just three weeks ago, she was here, in Washington, with her classmates, performing for her country at my inauguration. And a week later, she was shot and killed in a Chicago park after school, just a mile away from my house.”
Ward was found guilty of killing Pendleton and sentenced in 2019 to 84 years in prison. On Tuesday, Williams was found guilty and sentenced to 42 years in prison.
“Kenneth Williams is equally responsible for the physical death of our daughter, the death of her dreams and the generational death of her children and grandchildren,” said the teen’s mother, Cleopatra Crowley, her victim impact statement.
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