He Told His Doctor “Maybe Mommy Didn’t Mean to Hurt Me” the Story of AJ Freund
The police officers walked inside the home of the missing little boy. His family had just recently called to say that they couldn’t find him; nobody knew where he had gone. The house that the police walked into was absolutely filthy. There was even roach excrement on the little boy’s bed. But that wasn’t even the worst thing the police found that day. [Music]
Hey there, welcome or welcome back. I’m Cassie, and this is A Wicked World. Thanks for joining me today. Sorry if the lighting’s a little bit off, it’s been really awful outside, so I’m doing my best. Today’s case is another child crime and another one that could have and should have been prevented. This is the story of AJ Freund.
Andrew Freund Jr., or AJ as he liked to be called, was born October 14, 2013. He was a loving, affectionate, and outgoing little boy. He had a giggle and a laugh that was uniquely his own. AJ loved playing outside, and he also loved playing with his younger brother and wrestling with him as well. AJ loved drawing, reading, and putting puzzles together. He would even make sure a picture was taken of each puzzle that he finished. AJ could just sit for hours putting things together, such as the Lego sets he loved so much. AJ was very excited to start kindergarten in the fall and meet some new friends.
Unfortunately for AJ, he was not born into a good family. When he was born, he tested positive for opiates and benzodiazepines. At that time, he was temporarily removed from his mother and father’s custody. AJ’s parents were 36-year-old Joanne Cunningham and 60-year-old Andrew Freund Sr. Joanne and Andrew had met one day in 2012. They were both at the McHenry County courthouse, though for very different reasons. Joanne was there getting a divorce, while Andrew was actually an attorney himself. He saw Joanne sitting on a bench inside the courthouse crying, and he walked up to her to see what was wrong. Joanne had no job, no attorney, and was addicted to a dangerous mix of up to 15 different pain pills a day.
Andrew also had addiction problems with pills as well as alcohol, and at times, both of these addictions had almost cost him his legal career. However, he did still have his license, and at this time, he offered Joanne comfort and assistance in being her attorney. Their chance meeting in 2012 spiraled into a dysfunctional relationship that was fueled by drug abuse and violence. However, the year after they met, the couple had their first child, Andrew Jr. or AJ. They also had another child in 2014, just a year younger than AJ, and that child’s name was Parker.
When AJ was taken away from his parents after testing positive for drugs at birth, he was placed into foster care. In early 2014, Joanne and Andrew both began drug treatment, as well as random drug screens, parenting classes, and counseling. In June of 2015, a judge decided that they had done what they needed to do. They had been going to their drug treatment services for over a year, and they had been having their regular visits with AJ for the last year as well, and she granted them back custody of AJ.
Even though it seemed like things were going to be good again, in late 2018 or early 2019, Joanne and Andrew split up. They did, however, decide to stay in the same home together at 94 Dole Ave, Crystal Lake, Illinois. By April of 2019, Joanne not only had a boyfriend who had lived in the house at one point with her, Andrew, and the children, but she was also seven months pregnant with this boyfriend’s child. This boyfriend was in prison as well—no big surprise there, she does not have great taste in men.
So on the morning of April 18, 2019, AJ’s dad called the police saying that he had not seen AJ and he had no idea where he was. He told them the last time that he had seen him was when he had put him to bed the night prior around 9:30 PM. Andrew, however, seemed rather calm on the call and started over-explaining himself many times. He said that he had searched the house for an hour, couldn’t find AJ, and then he also went to AJ’s elementary school and looked around there but didn’t see him either. So at that point, the community-wide search started for five-year-old AJ.
When police got to the family house, they asked Andrew if he had a recent picture of AJ. After flipping through photos on his phone, he said that he couldn’t find any. None. He had no photos of his own son. Another officer saw Joanne speaking on the phone with her boyfriend and overheard the boyfriend asking Joanne if she had found AJ yet. The officer noted, however, that nothing was said about AJ missing while they were on the phone call. On top of all that, Andrew didn’t even know the color of his son’s eyes. He originally said blue, but after Joanne told him no, he changed his answer to brown, which was—ding ding ding—you’re correct this time. I mean, there’s not many other colors to choose from.
So the search was absolutely exhaustive. They searched nearly everywhere: the nearby woods, playgrounds, they even went out on boats and started searching the lake. The area residents were also helping as well. They were walking around the neighborhoods, looking in people’s backyards, looking through windows, looking everywhere they could possibly think of to try to find five-year-old AJ. They weren’t sure if maybe AJ had ran away—he was five years old, so that’s a possibility—or maybe he was abducted; police weren’t sure yet. So they went door-to-door asking people if they had seen him. They even had helicopters overhead searching to see if they could find the little boy that way.
When police were searching the home, they found that it was absolutely filthy. It was cluttered and dirty. There were piles of clothes thrown all over the dining room table, the couches, the chairs, everywhere. There was dog feces smeared into the floor and into blankets, giant stains on the carpets, tiles missing from the kitchen and the bathroom floors. Paint was peeling off the ceilings and the walls, and there were giant piles of garbage just left around the house. They even found a bag full of syringes while they were looking. So, not a great place to raise children at all.
When the police searched in AJ’s room, they found cockroach droppings on his pillow as well as his blankets. They also noticed that there was a lock on the outside of AJ’s door and his bedroom window was screwed shut. Andrew said that this was because he had tried to escape out the window once, so it was for his own good. Sounds like Dakota Collins’ dad, if I remember correctly, when he jumped out of the attic and then he boarded up the window so he couldn’t do it anymore. Maybe there was a reason AJ was trying to get out the window, I don’t know.
Very soon, the canines that the police had brought into the scene established that AJ had never left his home—at least not on his own two feet. The focus now turned to AJ’s parents. The family was already well-known by the Department of Child and Family Services for reported cases of abuse, cases that were all deemed to be unfounded by DCFS prior to April of 2019. We’ll get into the DCFS stuff later.
So the parents’ story started to unravel after the police searched Andrew’s cell phone. It was then that the investigators saw that there had been a search on Google for “child CPR.” They also found a picture of a shopping list, and some of the items on the shopping list were rather worrying. They included duct tape, plastic gloves, trash bags, bleach, and air freshener. Unlike every other true crime story, they had not been purchased at Walmart; they were purchased at their local Jewel-Osco. When the couple was questioned about this shopping list, they of course tried to explain it away. They said the tape was going to be used for hanging pictures. What kind of tape do you hang pictures with? Unless you mean like kids’ paper pictures, I don’t think you’re hanging any pictures with tape. And they said that all the bleach was simply for cleaning the house because they went through at least a bottle a week. I don’t even go through a bottle a month and my house is clean. Especially compared to their house, there’s no way they went through a bottle of bleach a month for cleaning purposes. The detectives were just as skeptical as I am.
The Google search for child CPR had been in the middle of the night, and Andrew said that it was probably Joanne who made that search, and she must have been looking because she wanted to know CPR for the new baby. Yeah, that seems like something Joanne’s concerned about. When police had been searching the home, they noted that there was a strong smell of bleach, and they had also noticed that there were at least four bleach bottles in the house. They also noticed that Andrew Freund’s gym shoes were dripping with mud. While Andrew was speaking with the investigators, he told them that Joanne believed AJ had Oppositional Defiant Disorder, or ODD. She believed that AJ thought of himself as the leader of the home and was especially defiant to his parents because of this. But then he went on to detail how AJ would be punished for doing something as simple as stacking the clean dishes in an incorrect manner.
Under all this mounting evidence, the couple decided to come clean. They finally confessed to the murder of AJ on the morning of April 24, 2019, and they were both subsequently placed under arrest. They admitted that on April 15th, AJ had lied to Joanne about soiling his underwear, so Joanne took him to the bathroom and put him under a cold shower. We later found out that not only did she put him under the cold shower at this time, but she beat him over and over again with a showerhead as well. Joanne forced him to stand in the freezing cold shower for 20 minutes. She then put him to bed, and a little while later when she went to check on him, she noticed that he wasn’t breathing.
So the next morning, Andrew took little AJ’s body down to the basement and put it inside of a plastic tote. Then the day after that, he removed AJ’s body from the plastic tote and replaced AJ’s body into trash bags. He then put him into the trunk of his car and drove him to a wooded area that was in Woodstock, about seven miles away from the family’s home. He dug a shallow grave, placed AJ’s body in it, covered it up, and then left. Law enforcement used a drone camera to search the area and set up their field tent. They were now searching for AJ’s body. They soon discovered a shallow grave, and inside were the remains of AJ Freund.
The autopsy of AJ’s body determined that he had died of multiple blunt force trauma blows to the head. It also showed that AJ had aspirated blood into both of his lungs. He had bruises and abrasions on his torso, his arms, as well as his legs. He also had patterned injuries of small circular abrasions on his central forehead that matched the showerhead found in the family’s bathtub.
As I said, there had been a pattern of reported abuse to DCFS in the past. So after AJ was originally given back to his parents in 2015, it seemed like things went well for a little while, and the family stayed out of DCFS’s radar for a few years. However, on March 21, 2018, DCFS initiated an investigation into allegations of neglect and abuse at the family home. A hospital social worker had actually called the DCFS hotline after observing odd bruising on AJ’s face. Police had found Joanne asleep in her car as she had relapsed on drugs. After a few unsuccessful attempts to see the children, DCFS was finally able to meet with the family, but it wasn’t until April 25, 2018—so a little over a month later. The investigators found the boys to be clean and found no signs of any maltreatment. So on May 17th, they made a final safety check to the home and they deemed that they found it safe, neat, and adequately furnished. Because of this, they decided the next day that they were going to close the case, and they did.
But then in September of 2018, so just a few months later, someone called for a well-being check on the house because they said it had been without power for weeks and it appeared run down to them. Joanne at the time would not let the police in; however, the police saw AJ and his brother and said that they appeared to be happy and healthy at the time. Police notified DCFS of the situation, but DCFS decided that they weren’t going to investigate just based on utilities being shut off. They live in Illinois, and September time is when it is beginning to get a little bit colder, so come December, January, it’s going to be freezing. If they have their heat powered by electric, that’s a concern. That’s definitely a concern for a DCFS worker, I would think.
So then in December of 2018, Joanne called the police accusing her boyfriend, Daniel Nowicki—this is the father of the baby that Joanne was pregnant with at the time of AJ’s death. So she called the police and accused him of stealing her cell phone as well as her Suboxone prescription. Now, Suboxone is a medication used to treat opioid addiction. When the police arrived to the house, they noted that it was cluttered, dirty, and in disrepair. Police also called DCFS after noticing a large bruise on AJ’s hip. At that time, both Joanne and AJ said that the family’s 60-pound boxer had jumped on him and knocked him down.
When AJ was brought into the doctor to be seen for this, what he told the doctor was very disturbing, and why he wasn’t removed right then and there is beyond any knowledge I’ll ever have. AJ said, “Maybe someone hit me with a belt. Maybe Mommy didn’t mean to hurt me.” This shocking response was what AJ said when the doctor pulled him to the side to speak to him privately. Even though the doctor informed DCFS of this comment, they still allowed AJ to go home with his mother, saying as long as his father was there, it was okay. I don’t know why it was okay—maybe because the father was not a drug addict at the time and the mom was. That doesn’t mean he’s any better or less of an abuser.
The day after this, DCFS made an unannounced visit to the house, and they said that at that time the house was in better condition than just the day prior when the police had been there. A few weeks later, on January 4, 2019, DCFS decided to close the case. So those were most of their run-ins with DCFS.
After police found AJ’s body, investigators started speaking to people who had known the family, and one neighbor spoke with them and said quite a few things. She told them that on Halloween night 2017, the family had arrived at her house for candy, and AJ had a substantial amount of medical tape wrapped around his head, torso, arms, and hands. He also, however, had clumps of hair missing and Vaseline spread on his face. The neighbor nicely asked, “Oh, are you a mummy?” to which Joanne told the neighbor that no, AJ had just accidentally spilled a pot of boiling water on himself.
The same neighbor also said that in the winter of that year, she remembered going outside walking her dog, and as she walked by the family’s house, she saw AJ and Parker outside in a running car and asked them what was going on. They said that they were going to be leaving to go to a motel before mommy and daddy killed each other. The neighbor could hear the parents inside the house arguing, and shortly after, Joanne came outside and yelled, “You better not call the police on us!” That neighbor says that she walked by another night in the winter and heard coming from the house a child’s voice saying, “I’m cold, I’m cold.” Multiple other people came forward to investigators to say that they had seen signs of abuse on AJ. This included credit union workers at the parents’ bank that they frequented, neighbors, and a co-worker of Andrew’s.
Soon after Andrew and Joanne were arrested, investigators were able to recover a deleted video from her cell phone. It was a two-minute video of her berating AJ for urinating in his bed. In the video, you can see AJ naked except for a few bandages around his hips and his wrist. He also had visible cuts and bruises on his face. It is said that the video was recorded on March 27, 2019. The full video was never released to the public; however, the audio was. In the recording, you hear AJ telling his mom that he wants bad people to do things to her so that she’ll leave him alone. He also told her that he no longer wanted a family. Joanne responds in the recording saying, “You don’t have one. Do you really think your dad would choose you over me and your brother?” During this interrogation as well, Joanne was said to have grabbed AJ by the throat and pushed him up against a wall, all the while insisting that he tell her who he was gonna get her in trouble with, until AJ started choking for air. The video was later played as evidence in court.
[Music] Joanne: “For what? With who? Who are you gonna get me in trouble with? Oh, who do you think you’re gonna get… Mitchell Lewis?” [Music] “AJ, remember, yes, when you tell the truth you don’t have to pause to answer. Who do you think you’re gonna get me in trouble with? With you? You think I’m gonna get in trouble with you? Are you my boss? Are you my parents? No. Why would I get in trouble with you? Because… oh no, I mean, who do you think you’re gonna… think who’s gonna go to to try to get me in trouble? Um… me or Parker as you think? How would you… who would you go to to get us in trouble? Go to nobody here? And just… you understand, really coaching nobody to get us in trouble, then how would we get in trouble? Don’t [ __ ] me. Do you think I’m dumb or you don’t? Leave it. No answers? Yeah. Who do you think you were gonna get me and Parker in trouble with? What were you thinking is going to happen to us? When we did… if you think you were gonna get in trouble, what do you think that trouble’s gonna do to us? Thank you.” [Foreign] [Music]
“Okay, now, doing the right thing and not listening, you would get in trouble by that, right? So how would that get us in trouble? Tell me. How is you getting them going to get me and Parker in trouble? Um… can’t? Oh. Then where do you… are you lying or are you just making things up as you go? Yes, you are lying. No? Is it… is it because you’re trying to make me mad enough or is Daddy or anybody mad enough where we punish you and hit you and take stuff away from you, so it looks… it looks like you’re the poor victim? You play… you want to play poor man? You know exactly. Daddy and I have told you what this could do. I could get you and Parker taken away. I could, if I was really… I’m not perfect, and water… there’s no way we could get in trouble. But why are your plans… let’s just say it was our problem. Who would you go tell to get us in trouble?”
AJ: “Oh, I will tell him.”
Joanne: “What would you do? What would be your grand plan, huh? How would you get us in trouble?”
AJ: “Um, we’re in trouble with bad people. When we get in trouble with bad people… like really bad people.” [Music]
Joanne: “My crew? Who’s that? Oh, we would get in trouble by very bad people, very mean people. What does that mean? Are you saying that you… you are afraid of the devil? But there aren’t any mean people into our life, or what does that mean? Okay, who’s badder than me? I don’t get what that means. What would they do to us, huh?”
AJ: “It would hurt us.”
Joanne: “Huh? Why? Like, what? Twice, especially like that? Do I… do I cause evil? I’ll come between you anyway to you? No? Just start up? No. Does anyone else? No? Nobody in this house does that? No. I’m just mean. So why would you wish that? Why would you want that for us? They didn’t… I know you know the truth and we have a motive. I just want to know what it is. What bad people?”
AJ: “Um, like some pretty evil people look… swear… but I’m not gonna be out of that room.”
Joanne: “Listen, I’m in this home and nobody here does that. Thank you. So you wish that me and Parker were sent away into a bad home to get hurt? What’s the difference between that and this, and what you’re doing here? So why don’t you want… why wouldn’t you want Daddy to be hurt or to go to a bad home? Just me and Parker, huh?”
AJ: “I wanna… I wanna be happy.”
Joanne: “Because you think he falls for your [ __ ]? Hey, because me and Parker… don’t you want us gone, then what? Say it. Don’t say ‘on people’. Why? So you can’t spell for me for bad people to hurt me and do bad things, is that what it is? You… you just said you hope… yeah, yeah, that’s… you said that’s what you want.”
Andrew told the police that the injuries seen in the video had all been caused by Joanne. He said that her punishments were hard physical beatings, and he didn’t agree with them, and he told her to take it easier on the little boy: give him cold showers instead. When Joanne would hit him, Andrew said oftentimes he would have to intercept and stop her from hitting AJ. I don’t know. In court, when Joanne was allowed to speak on her behalf, she called her son smart, brilliant, handsome, courageous, driven, and absolutely loved. She said, “I had the privilege of having AJ as a son. I love him, I miss him, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to bring him back. Anyone who truly knows me knows how much I love being a mother more than anything in the world. Being a mom defines me. My children gave me a purpose. I miss all of them so much.”
AJ’s death was not a quiet and peaceful one. It was a vicious and brutal attack. It was blow after blow, all while being forced to stand in a freezing cold shower while his mother screamed in his face. After this, his brain had swelled to the point where it had crushed itself into his skull and AJ lost his life. But she has the nerve to say those kind of things about being a mom.
On July 17, 2020, Joanne Cunningham was sentenced to 35 years in prison. This came seven months after pleading guilty to one count of murder. On September 18, 2020, Andrew Freund Sr. pled guilty to aggravated battery of a child, voluntary manslaughter, and concealment of a homicidal death, and he was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Also, as part of a plea agreement, he must cooperate in an investigation against DCFS. Joanne’s boyfriend, the baby’s biological father, had petitioned to get custody of the child after Joanne gave birth in prison. He, however, ended up dying of a suspected drug overdose. So the foster home that AJ had spent time in as a baby actually took in his brother Parker as well as this new baby of Joanne’s, and they have custody of them at this time.
AJ’s public visitation was held at the Davenport Family Funeral Home in Crystal Lake. A long line of over 5,000 people were present, waiting to pay their respects to AJ. Many of them brought flowers, balloons, and carried stuffed animals. They also all wore the color blue, which was AJ’s favorite color. They tied blue ribbons around trees all over the Crystal Lake community for AJ.
Charges were actually brought up against the DCFS workers who had mishandled AJ’s case, and this is going to be the best part because this never seems to happen in any child abuse cases, and it finally did. They brought up charges against Carlos Acosta and Andrew Polovin. Polovin was Acosta’s supervisor, and Acosta was the one who was assigned to AJ’s case. They were both charged in September of 2020 with two counts of endangering the life of a child causing death and one count of reckless conduct causing great bodily harm. The indictment says that the two men, in a willful manner, knowingly caused or permitted the life or health of Andrew Freund Jr. (AJ) to be endangered, and that was the proximate cause of the boy’s death. They both pleaded not guilty to the charges and both requested separate jury trials. Acosta and Polovin, however, were released from the McHenry County Jail after posting bond in September of 2020. They were the ones that closed the case believing that the family dog had merely jumped on AJ, even after he had told the doctor that his mom had hit him. AJ’s estate also filed a lawsuit against the DCFS investigator as well as his supervisor. The beneficiaries of this estate, and who will receive the money if this is won, are AJ’s siblings.
In the beginning of 2020, a Chicago demolition company actually tore down the family’s home. Green Demolition did the job for free, as they didn’t want anyone to benefit off of this tragedy of AJ’s death, and everyone wanted this awful, disgusting house gone. So, bye-bye. Now Joanne Cunningham is trying to challenge her conviction by saying that she had postpartum depression and psychosis at the time of AJ’s death and that’s what caused her to do it. So we’ll see where that goes. I’ll keep you updated if I hear anything new because I hope she doesn’t get anywhere with that. That’s a load of BS if you’re just coming up with that now.
Well, thank you for listening to all of AJ’s story today. I am so sick of hearing about these child cases where they were not only failed by their own parents but they were failed by the services put in place to protect them. I’m glad that they are at least seeing some kind of repercussions for what they did this time, but not DCFS as a whole, just the two workers, which is great but it’s not enough. We still need reform in the whole system, otherwise this is just going to keep happening over and over and over. So if you do like true crime, don’t forget to hit that subscribe button below or give this video a like, both are appreciated. I also have a Patreon set up now, so if you’d like to help support the channel, the link is actually in the description below. Thanks for watching A Wicked World. Until next time, take care guys, bye. Thank you.
