Hooker Who Stabbed Brother Rice Teacher to Death Will Claim Self Defense

A young woman who showed up at a schoolteacher’s Orland Park house to trade in sex, only to stab him to death, will claim self defense when she goes to trial next year.

Alisha Walker’s attorney said Brother Rice High School teacher Al Filan, 61, came at the 22-year-old Walker with a knife after they argued over her payment, reports the Chicago Tribune.

His friends remembered Filan — a popular teacher at the Southwest Side school for 40 years — as a blunt and cantankerous man, but his apparent predilection for prostitutes surprised many.

Attorney Patrick O’Byrne’s statements about his killer’s defense echo what Walker’s mother told reporters shortly after the slaying in January 2014.

“Alisha told me she had to, that there was nothing else she could do. The only way I see my baby doing that is if she was in danger, in harm. It was either him or her. I think she freaked out,” Sherri Chatman of Akron, Ohio, said at the time.

Walker, who’s charged with first-degree murder, and another woman met Filan after he responded to her ad on Backpage.com, a classifieds website with a notorious section that deals in sex for sale. She told police she wrestled a knife away from the teacher and stabbed him. She said he was threatening her and the other woman.

Orland Park police said Walker had met Filan on at least two previous occasions. Investigators found a stack of Backpage.com sex ads on his desk.

Filan’s body, stabbed 13 times in the chest, the arms and behind his ear, was found on his kitchen floor on Jan. 21, 2014. Police went to his home in the 9400 block of Georgetown after the popular teacher failed to show up for school.

Walker has a history of prostitution, battery and drug arrests. She left Akron at age 18 for Chicago and began selling her body for sex. She was 20 when she was arrested. A Jan. 11 trial date has been set.

After knifing Filan, police said, she walked out of his house — leaving a trail of blood on the floor with her high-heeled shoes — and fled the state.

Police found her three days later in Indiana. Denied bail, she’s been locked up in Cook County jail ever since.

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