MONROE, Louisiana — Katelyn Hearn remembers the day that she met the man she identified on Wednesday as Quinton Tellis, telling the court that “he creeped me out” enough that she went inside and locked the door.
Hearn testified on Day 3 of the murder trial of Tellis in the 2015 death of Ming Chen “Mandy” Hsiao in Monroe, Louisiana. Tellis, who remains the main suspect in the 2014 burning death of Jessica Chambers in Courtland, Mississippi, is alleged to have killed Hsiao less than 10 months after Chambers’ death.
Prosecutors used Hearn’s testimony to help draw out a timeline of when Tellis was at Hsiao’s apartment in the days leading up to her death.
Hearn said Hsiao had visitors from time to time, including a woman in a gold vehicle. But she had only seen the black Impala registered to Tellis’s then-fiancee Chakita Jackson within the week of Hsiao’s death. The first time she saw it, she told the court, was on July 27, 2015.
READ: Tellis trial, Day 1: Interview videos
She had been asleep, Hearn testified, when she heard someone knock on the door, and then heard footsteps retreating down the metal stairs outside her upstairs apartment. Thinking it was a package being delivered, she went to the door, where she found a child. Hearn said the child asked her, “Do you know where that white lady that lives downstairs is?”
Hearn told him no, then looked down the stairs to see an adult man standing by Hsiao’s bike and a young teenager standing by the Impala. The man she identified in court as Tellis struck up a conversation, asking her if she knew where Hsiao was. He ended up asking her,”Do you have a baby inside?”
The question was strange, Hearn thought, and she testified that “red flags went up.” She told the judge that she has an almost photographic memory, and it’s heightened when she has an extreme reaction to things. She testified that the fear that she felt sharpened her memory of Tellis, particularly his face. When she identified him in a photo lineup after Hsiao’s body was found, she remembered him clearly.
The black car would come back twice more that day, once after Hsiao came home, and then again that evening. On the second visit, she didn’t see Tellis, but she saw the two children from before playing in the yard. Given that she had been afraid the last time he was there, Hearn called her boyfriend and asked him to come home for lunch. When he left, Hearn asked him to get the license plate of the black Impala. She said she often gets the license numbers of strange vehicles.
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On the third time she saw the vehicle that day, she heard a voice she remembered as belonging to the man she identified as Tellis from the conversation that morning and he seemed to be arguing with Hsiao. Defense attorney Randy Donald asked her on cross examination about a statement she had made about Hsiao being a loud talker, in case it wasn’t an actual argument.
“She was a loud talker, but I could tell her voice was raised,” Hearn said. She testified that even when Hsiao had company, she could never hear the conversations, except occasionally when they laughed loudly.
On the night of July 29, Hearn testified that she and her boyfriend had been out and came home around dusk. When they pulled in, they could tell that Hsiao’s lights were off, but her bike was outside. Hearn said she noted that because usually when they pulled in, they could see into her apartment because the lights were on. She noted that for some reason, the apartment being dark “creeped me out again.”
As they prepared dinner, Hearn went into her bedroom to change clothes. She heard a noise come from downstairs that sounded like the bed falling off the frame, a problem she had with her bed in the pre-furnished apartment that exactly mirrored Hsiao’s. She mentioned to her boyfriend that it sounded like “Mandy’s having the same problem with her bed that we have.”
Hearn said the problem with the bed frame was one that was frequent. She said it would fall of sometimes just when she would roll over in her sleep.
“Sometimes even just if you sat down on the bed to tie your shoe,” she said.
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Hsiao’s bed was off the frame just like Hearn described when her body was found, according to crime scene photos.
The couple went on to prepare dinner with the TV on. Hearn told the court that when they watched TV while they cooked, they always had to turn it up loud because they couldn’t hear it very well from the kitchen otherwise. They didn’t hear anything else from Hsiao’s apartment that night.
Hearn testified that the porch light remained on and the bike remained in the same place until the night of August 8, when her boyfriend went downstairs to throw a breaker and when he came back up he told her that he didn’t want to freak her out, but there were flies in the door and a foul smell coming from Hsiao’s apartment. Hearn said he told her he thought Hsiao might be deceased.
The couple alerted the landlord, who went inside the apartment and found Hsiao’s body. Going to the parking lot across the street, he used a call box for the University of Louisiana Monroe’s police department. They alerted Monroe Police Department, and detectives came to the scene. Hearn gave her first statement to police that night.
On cross-examination, Donald pushed on the timeline, as well as asking Hearn about prior visitors to Hsiao’s house. He referenced a statement she had made about people she noticed visiting her neighbor, asking her if they were “a criminal element.” She replied that she believed she had said that they weren’t the kind of people she’d have invited into her home.
When Donald continued to ask about the “criminal element,” Hearn said that because of her previous traumatic life experience, she was simply sensitive to whether people looked safe or not. There was a bit of comic relief when Donald continued the questioning and finally she said, “No offense, but I wouldn’t invite you into my house either, and you don’t look like a criminal, if that helps explain what I’m trying to say.”
Hearn also disputed Tellis’s statements on video interviews that he met Hsiao when she was riding bikes with children on the street by saying she had never seen Hsiao ride bikes with children.
Court adjourned Wednesday around 1 p.m. and will be back on Thursday morning at 9 a.m. Court officials say testimony probably won’t be done this week, which means that there will be another court date scheduled in the future, but it won’t be next week.
