Preparations for the arrival of Jennifer Hudson, the singer and actress and beloved product of Chicago, at this city’s criminal courthouse were elaborate and months in the works: a private entrance was readied, a crush of news and entertainment reporters were required to sign pledges to abide by stringent rules of courtroom decorum and potential jurors were quizzed about their knowledge of “American Idol” and “Dreamgirls.”
Jennifer Hudson, pictured in January, was the first prosecution witness at her former brother-in-law's murder trial.
But when Ms. Hudson appeared, at last, in a courtroom on Monday, the dizziness over her celebrated rise to stardom quickly gave way to the bleak circumstances that had brought her — the shooting deaths of her 7-year-old nephew, her brother and her mother in one of Chicago’s grittiest South Side neighborhoods, Englewood. Glamour was wiped away.
“Yes, that’s my mommy,” Ms. Hudson testified on Monday afternoon, when asked to look at a photograph. Ms. Hudson told jurors that she had slept in a bed with her mother until she was 16 years old. Even as an adult, she said, she communicated with her mother every day, often by text messages that began arriving early in the morning. Nothing arrived one morning in October 2008, Ms. Hudson testified, in her first hint that something was wrong.
Ms. Hudson was the first prosecution witness called in a murder trial against William Balfour, her former brother-in-law, who prosecutors say shot Ms. Hudson’s family members in 2008 after growing jealous and possessive of his wife, Julia Hudson, Ms. Hudson’s sister.
Jennifer Hudson, who first drew national attention with appearances on “American Idol” in 2004 and went on to win an Oscar for her role as the singer Effie in “Dreamgirls,” was undeniably the most anticipated participant in this trial. Until the moment she stepped up to the witness stand, there was speculation about when and whether she would appear.
In the end, she answered questions for only about 30 minutes, the judge pausing to offer her time to compose herself and urging her, at one point, to speak up and slow down. Ms. Hudson said she had been traveling, in Florida, in 2008 when her family members were killed, but quickly flew home, and went to the Cook County medical examiner’s office to identify her mother, Darnell Donerson, and her brother, Jason Hudson, both of whom were found inside the family home, as well as a young nephew, Julian King, who was later found inside an S.U.V. that was taken from the home.
Mr. Balfour, who went to grade school with Ms. Hudson and who could face life in prison, has pleaded not guilty. In an opening statement on Monday, his lawyer suggested that Ms. Hudson’s prominence had left law enforcement authorities feeling special pressure to solve the case quickly, leading them to focus on Mr. Balfour right away, despite a lack of physical evidence against him.
But a prosecutor said Mr. Balfour, who had been estranged from Julia Hudson, had repeatedly threatened her, even pledging that he would kill her family first, then her. The lawyers on both sides seemed to agree about only one thing — a grim picture of lives in Englewood, a neighborhood where the drug trade seemed to thrive and where gunshots were heard but sometimes ignored because they were too ordinary.
Jennifer Hudson told jurors she had not liked Mr. Balfour ever, not in the sixth-grade class they attended together in Englewood and not later. “None of us wanted her to marry him,” she said of her sister.
“I tried to keep my distance with William any chance I got,” Jennifer Hudson told the jurors. “Where he was, I tried not to be.”