Nakia Akins last saw Mya Lyons playing with her children before the little girl’s older brother nicknamed “Fudge” got a phone call and told her they needed to rush home.
Akins was roused in her sleep by a knock on her door a half hour later.
Mya was missing, Mya’s brother told her.
Akins said on Tuesday she ran outside that late summer night and saw Mya’s father’s van driving down her South Side street.
Then the 38-year-old said she heard Richard Lyons “crying and screaming” in front of his home as relatives stood on the porch in the 8400 block of South Gilbert Court.
Lyons’ display of emotion, however, was only a “show” to cover his tracks in Mya’s brutal murder, Assistant Cook County State’s Attorney Fabio Valentini said at the opening of Lyons’ trial at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse.
Lyons claimed he found his daughter after she wandered out of his home late night on July 14, 2008.
But it was he who repeatedly stabbed his daughter in the van, hit her head with a lockbox and then dumped her body in an alley, Valentini said.
He tried to be a “savior” and “hero” by pretending he stumbled upon her battered body, Valentini said.
Lyons, now 45, misled police and others into believing there was a “bogeyman” but he didn’t exist, Valentini said.
Mya’s mother, Erica Barnes, also took the stand Tuesday, saying that it wasn’t like her daughter to runaway or leave home at night by herself.
“She was scared of the dark,” Barnes said.
Mya, who lived with her mother in Elgin, had been visiting her father when she was killed.
Lyons, who prosecutors said destroyed the clothes he wore at the time of the murder, never came to the vigil Barnes held a year after she was killed, Barnes said.
He wasn’t arrested until 2 1/2 years later after prosecutors hired a blood splatter expert who said evidence showed Mya was killed in the van and not the weedy alley where Lyons said he found her.
Lyons had driven Mya to Jackson Park Hospital where he had his uncle take her inside, Valenti said.
“She was cold. She was deceased and there was an intestine sticking out,” the prosecutor said.
At the time of his arrest, prosecutors said Lyons told doctors that Mya “might have been bitten by a dog.”
Assistant Public Defender Andrea Webber told jurors Tuesday Lyons was innocent and that prosecutors just needed someone to blame.
Prosecutors hired a blood spatter expert for $40,000 just to tell them what they wanted to hear, Webber said.
“They [prosecutors] were going to solve this case at any cost,” she said.
Lyons was a “truly upset father” when he found his daughter, Webber added, urging to jurors to acquit her client.
Lyons, a former Northwestern Hospital radiology technician, also is awaiting trial for assaulting a 15-year-old boy in an unrelated case.
