A trial date has finally been set in the police killing of John Wrana, the frail, 95-year-old World War II veteran I've been telling you about for some time now.

The trial is scheduled to begin Sept. 15, in a tiny courtroom in Markham, a bench trial under Associate Judge Luciano Panici, of Chicago Heights, a gruff-sounding man with a mustache and a hard Chicago accent rather similar to my own.

He is said to love Frank Sinatra music and is a fan of the famous Italian soccer team Juventus.

On TV and in the movies, courtroom dramas are played out in courtrooms with soft light and rich, dark wood all around. The sound quality is always good in the courtroom dramas, where even whispers add to the tension of the big speech yet to come.

But this is Markham and it's not telegenic. Panici's courtroom is a cramped, stark place, tiny, with a couple of rows of uncomfortable chairs and harsh light and no microphones to amplify the big speech.

Those few chairs for spectators will have to do for any WW II-era vets who'll try to attend and show support for Wrana's family. They should know that the trial is expected to take only about three days or so.

We'll also hear many, many references to the elderly, and of the respect Park Forest cops show to the elderly, and how all law enforcement respects and reveres the elderly. The judge won't mind and neither will prosecutors, since seniors do much of the voting in Cook County.

And when it's over, prosecutors or defense lawyers or perhaps even both sides will nod their heads somberly and use that magic word: justice.

Then most of the media that have ignored the case will have that magic term "justice" to wrap the Wrana story in, and then nod to the camera and say goodbye to it.

In court the other day, Craig Taylor, the Park Forest cop who fired the shotgun loaded with beanbag rounds, stood with his attorney in a pretrial hearing. He hasn't been charged with manslaughter, although his trigger finger did most of the work. Taylor has been hit with the rather ambiguous charge of felony reckless conduct, which carries a maximum of three years in prison.

He was the only Park Forest cop charged. But he wasn't alone on July 26, 2013.

Five officers were on the scene that night to deal with Wrana in his room at Victory Centre of Park Forest. The old man seemed delusional, perhaps because of a urinary tract infection, but refused to accept medical treatment.

You'd think five police officers could handle one frail old man. You'd think they'd use their hands, or perhaps a rolled-up newspaper or a spaghetti mop from the janitor's closet.

The cops had hands, yes, but they also had a Taser, and a riot shield, handguns and finally, that 12-gauge Mossberg pump-action police shotgun loaded with beanbag rounds.

Park Forest police said they were afraid for their lives. The old man was armed, they said, with what they first thought was a machete. That turned out to be a shoehorn. They said he had a knife, though family members don't remember him using one. Cops said he threatened to throw it at them.

John Wrana wasn't some blind master ninja from a Hollywood movie. He wasn't a deadly jungle fighter who could throw knives with deadly power and hide behind trees and give karate kicks to strong, young cops. He was a few weeks shy of his 96th birthday and needed a walker or a cane to get around.

The beanbag rounds fired by Taylor can travel 190 mph. Prosecutors said Taylor was 6 to 8 feet from the old man, in apparent violation of safety standards.

According to investigators, Taylor fired and pumped and fired and pumped on and on, until five rounds were spent.

Wrana died later in the hospital of internal bleeding from those rounds fired into his guts. His stepdaughter, Sharon Mangerson, told me that doctors explained to her that Wrana would likely die in surgery or live as a vegetable. The old man wanted no part of that.

That doesn't mean he wanted to die. It means he wanted to live his way.

Mangerson has filed a federal civil rights case against all five cops, not just the one on the trigger, as well as the police chief and the village of Park Forest.

Jim Sotos, the attorney representing Park Forest on the civil side, told the Sun-Times that the media had mistreated police by "Monday morning quarterbacking" the case.

By media he means me.

What amazed me is something else Sotos said: That Wrana might have lived if his family had allowed him to undergo surgery. In other words, it wasn't the fault of the cops. It was the fault of Wrana's family.

You see how this thing will roll? They shoot him down and then blame him and his family.

As both sides prepare for the criminal trial, I still can't tell if we're seeing the mighty scales of impartial justice begin to swing, or whether this is a heater case being cooled by experts, with a fall guy and blame heaped on the victim and a big speech about justice to contain the political and monetary damage.

We'll see. In any case, I plan on being there.

jskass@tribune.com

Twitter @John_Kass