- Sun-Times Media
- Chicago police officials announce murder charges against Jason Austin in 2008. The charges were later dropped, and several witnesses allege that they were coerced or beaten into implicating Austin.
Gustavo Granados said he told the police what little he knew when they came by his west-side auto shop on August 15, 2008.
Granados agreed to review his records and talk with his three employees about the Buick Regal. He said that Austin had brought it in about a month earlier to have body work done on one of the doors and the rear fender. Then he’d brought it back. “The job had not been done right,” Granados said.
He said he was taken to a west-side police station and interrogated by at least eight cops. They informed him that Austin was the murderer “and he was going to die by lethal injection,” Granados said.
Granados said police officers have stopped by his auto shop to talk with him on at least three or four occasions since then. “I don’t talk to them because they change things around,” he said.
Prosecutors say that’s because Austin’s brother and drug supplier visited Granados at his shop and threatened him. They displayed photographs of the two men on a projector in the courtroom Thursday and asked Granados if they’d ever come into his shop.
