Chapter 110: The Factual Basis
Serena Montigue was indicted on the sixth of October 2026 on two counts.
Count one: aggravated battery of a child under thirteen, causing great bodily harm. A Class X felony. Six to thirty years and not probationable.
Count two: endangering the life or health of a child. A Class A misdemeanour.
On the sixteenth of April 2027 she pleaded guilty to a Class 3 felony and went home the same afternoon.
Vukovich told me a week before, in the corridor outside 302, in about four minutes.
“I am going to tell you what I am doing. I am not going to ask your permission.”
“It isn’t yours to give, and pretending otherwise is a kindness that costs you later.”
“All right.”
“Count one requires the jury to find great bodily harm. Do you know what the defense exhibit is at that trial?”
“No.”
“A photograph of a child running across a lawn.” She said it without any cruelty. “He is twenty-one months old and he is well. It healed in six weeks.”
“And there is a radiologist in this city who will testify, for four hundred dollars an hour, that this is the commonest injury in pediatrics.”
“It wasn’t a fall.”
“I know it wasn’t. I have to prove it wasn’t to twelve people who have all seen a child fall off a sofa.”
She looked at her watch and did not move.
“If the jury will not find great bodily harm, count one is gone. Count two is a misdemeanour and she walks out with supervision and no conviction at all.”
“That is the real alternative. Not prison. Nothing.”
“So you take the three.”
“So I take the three, and she is a convicted felon for the rest of her life, and every background check she ever sits for returns a hit.”
She went in. I sat down on the bench outside and did the arithmetic, which is what I do instead of the other thing.
The plea was called at ten forty on the sixteenth of April.
The room was half full. Two reporters. Odette Kramer, the guardian ad litem, in front with a folder. Victor four rows back. Marco at the end of a bench with his hat in his hands.
Constance Blackwood was not there and had not been at anything since the twenty-sixth of February.
Salcedo took eleven minutes over the admonishments. Serena said yes to all of it in a voice you could barely hear.
The right to a jury, waived. The right to confront witnesses, waived.
The maximum, the minimum, the fines, and the fact that she was surrendering an appeal she had already half won.
Then Vukovich read the factual basis, and this is the part nobody warns you about.
The State would prove that on or about the fourteenth of September 2026, in Cook County, the defendant knowingly caused bodily harm to E.B., a child then fourteen months of age, by grasping and pulling his left forearm.
That is thirty-nine words.
Six months in a corridor. Nineteen entries. A dead woman. An invoice for eighty-five thousand dollars.
Thirty-nine words, and none of them were about any of it.
Salcedo asked, “Ms. Montigue, are those facts substantially true?”
Serena said, “Yes.”
“How do you plead to count one as amended?”
“Guilty.”
Thirty months of felony probation. Two hundred and forty hours of public service. Mandatory counselling.
Restitution of two thousand four hundred and eighty-nine dollars for the hospital account, and costs.
An order of no contact with E.B. and with any minor not related to her by blood.
And one thing not in the sentence at all, which Kramer had stated on the record anyway.
The Department of Children and Family Services had entered an indicated finding of physical abuse against her on the fourth of November 2026.
That goes on the State Central Register, and for physical abuse against a child it is retained fifty years.
She will never hold a license to work in a day care, a school, a hospital, a camp or a group home in this state.
Anyone running a background check will see it until she is eighty-three.
Kramer read two sentences on Ethan’s behalf and then sat down.
Ethan Blackwood is twenty-one months old. He does not have the words for what happened to him and by the time he does, everyone in this room will have moved on.
Nobody said anything for a moment after that.
Then the clerk called the next matter, a retail theft from a pharmacy on Cermak, and the room turned over the way rooms do.
Outside, on the steps, Marco stood next to me and neither of us said anything for a while.
“You’re counting,” he said.
“Yes.”
“What.”
Two hundred and fourteen days from the foyer to the plea.
Nine hundred and thirteen days of probation, served at home, reporting once a month by telephone after the first six.
Forty-two days for that bone to heal at his age, which is what I wrote in the log on the twenty-sixth of October 2026, in the last entry I ever made in it.
“Two hundred and fourteen,” I said.
Marco put his hat on.
“Doyle’s looking for you,” he said. “Montigue’s lawyer filed something in the probate case this morning.”