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SOUTH BEND – 20 to 30.
That’s the number of times Jacqueline Wilk told a detective she’d found her kids playing in her car in the past.
10.
That’s how many times she heard them knocking from inside the trunk and let them out.
Wednesday was day 3 of Wilk’s child neglect trial.
She’s accused of not watching her boys on a hot June day in 2011.
The 2- and 4-year-old somehow got into her the car trunk and later died.
Wilk is planning to take the witness stand before the end of her trial, but in a taped interview she gave a Metro Homicide detective four days after she found her boys in her car trunk, she claimed she was sleeping, studying, texting and facebooking on and off on June 17, the day this happened.
She also admitted she searched for them at least an hour before finding them locked in the hot trunk of her car.
During the taped interview, a detective tried to nail down a timeline of events on June 17 that led to Wilk finding her two little boys in her car trunk.
Wilk said she went to bed between 3 and 4 that morning.
Then maybe around 10 or 11 a.m., her 4-year-old peed in her bed, and the boys were in and out of her room a few times after that.
She remembered seeing a missed call on her cell phone at 11:47 a.m.
Then at 2:04 p.m., Wilk realized she hadn’t seen or heard her boys for a while, so she began searching for them.
She called 911 at 2:58 p.m.
“If I would have just locked my doors, they never would have got in there. They’re always unlocked,” she sobbed to the detective.
Later in that interview, Detective Galen Pelletier told her “I’m not saying you’re a bad mom. If you fell asleep….”
“It’s bad, yes it is,” Wilk cried. “No matter what anybody thinks, I blame myself, and I’ve gotta deal with it for the rest of my life.”
After watching the interview, the defense attorney grilled Pelletier on the witness stand.
“Jacki told you when she was in the basement that she could hear the kids, but she couldn’t see them, right?" asked Wilk’s attorney, Chuck Lahey.
