Category Archives: Crime reporting

Collision with train leaves teenager dead

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I don’t believe the family of this Girard teenager ever got the answers they were searching for about how this crash happened. The mother wore her son’s class ring on her finger as she took me and photographer Shannon Kirshner to the crash site in October 2007. I’ll never know how she managed to keep herself together.

Mourning ‘Munchy’ / Girard teen died when car he was driving was struck by train
Oct. 29, 2007

GIRARD – To his friends, Matt Munchalfen was “Munchy,” a shy, all-around good guy who had a secret crush on a popular schoolmate. To his neighbors, he was the dependable young man who showed up to cut their grass, rake their leaves and put up riprap at their lakeside homes.

His younger brother and sister could count on Matt for rides and advice. Matt’s father expected his son to take over the family electrical business. He already could fully wire a garage.

And Matt was his mother’s first-born child. Despite being a busy 19-year-old, he often stopped by her bedroom to chat whenever he returned home from a night out with his friends.

“I didn’t know how many people Matt touched, how many people he knew,” Joanne Munchalfen said last week. “This is something that hits close to home for all parents.”

Matt, a senior at Girard High School, died Oct. 13 when an Amtrak train struck his sport utility vehicle as he crossed a track on Greenridge Road two miles from his home.

There is no clear-cut answer for why the accident happened. Matt was killing time that morning. He was to meet his dad at the shop, and they were to work on a deck project. His father was running late, and it was raining. Joanne Munchalfen believes he was going to a popular four-wheeling spot to see if any of his friends were out riding.

He headed west on Greenridge Road, a crossing with only a yield sign that last week was partially obscured by overgrown tree limbs.

Several factors make the crossing unique. The railroad track runs parallel to Illinois 4. When heading west on Greenridge, drivers must stop just on the other side of the track for a stop sign at the highway.

To the north, the track is a double track. Once it makes a slight curve about a half a mile north of the crossing, it narrows to one track. A large steel maintenance or utility box for the railroad sits north of the crossing on the east side of the rails and partially obscures the vision of drivers heading west on Greenridge.

There are no flashing lights or crossing arms at the intersection.

Joanne Munchalfen said she was told there was a vehicle sitting on the other side of the tracks at the stop sign for the highway and that a second train was sitting where the double track becomes a single track.

She believes all those factors may have distracted her son and, combined with the lack of train warnings, contributed to him driving onto the track in front of the train.

Illinois State Police handled the crash investigation. A report does not note a vehicle sitting at the stop sign or workers on the track.

The southbound Amtrak, consisting of an engine and four passenger cars, was going about 78 mph. The conductor told police he blew the train’s horn upon approaching the crossing but the driver of the white Ford Explorer did not slow down prior to crossing the track.

The train dragged the SUV 2,100 feet before it could stop.

Matt’s cell phone was found at the accident site, and Joanne Munchalfen said she and her husband checked the call history but found no evidence that Matt was on the phone at the time of the crash.

“He was always my cautious child. He never took risks. He was just a good kid,” Joanne Munchalfen said. “They said he was looking south at the time. I’m hoping that’s the case, that he didn’t know what hit him.”

Joanne Munchalfen, who wears Matt’s class ring on her finger, is committed to getting out the word that drivers, especially teenagers, need to be more cautious around railroad crossings. She also hopes to get the attention of someone who can put up a more effective crossing signal at the Green Ridge intersection.

She also is concerned about Matt’s friends, who are going to the accident site to leave memorials for Matt.

“I just don’t want to see this happen to anybody else,” she said. “I was always worried about deer. I never in a million years thought about a rural railroad.”

Capt. Tim Reents, commander of the District 18 state police in Litchfield, said police try to educate young drivers about the dangers of railroad crossings.

“What I tell people about railroad crossings is even if they have warning lights or even if they have the cross arms that come down, don’t always trust those because they are mechanical devices. They can fail,” he said. “I would treat every train crossing as if there is a train coming. Slow down, turn the radio down, maybe roll the window down, look both ways, listen and just be very, very cautious.”

He said drivers also should be particularly careful at crossings where the railroad track parallels a highway, such as the crossing on Greenridge Road.

“A lot of times what will happen is that even though the track may parallel evenly with the road, those crossings will angle a little and you almost have to look back over your shoulder to see if anything is coming,” Reents said.

Reents said the state police review all collisions between vehicles and trains, and if they believe there is an issue, they alert the Illinois Department of Transportation.

“Our officers are pretty good when they go out and handle a crash, especially a fatal or a serious accident, if they start going to same place over and over again, they’re pretty good about bringing things to our attention,” he said.

“I think everyone would like to have something to put their finger on and say, ‘That’s why it happened,’ and a lot of times you can’t put your fingers on those things,” he said. “You can know the dynamics – how fast it was going, how far it traveled, the point of impact. You can do all those scientific things, but to know what was going on in people’s minds is difficult.”

Meanwhile, Joanne Munchalfen continues her search for answers and tells others to hug their kids often.

“It’s only been a week, and I think the thing my husband and I have noticed is how adult he really was. He would just take over things and do them,” she said, crying. “I think he was happy. He just had so many things going for him, and I guess that’s why it’s so unreal.”

Homeless man beaten to death outside library

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Lincoln Library, the public library in Springfield, became an unauthorized homeless shelter of sorts the summer of 2007. For some reason, numerous homeless people began spending their days and nights hanging around and sleeping on the sidewalks outside the library instead of at the shelters downtown.

Things came to a head one night in July, when one homeless man beat and stomped to death another homeless man outside the library. I learned that the victim, Timothy Ryan, hadn’t always been homeless and that he, in fact, had family here in the city.

I attended Tim’s funeral and remember looking at all the photographs of him as a child and a teenager, wondering how he got into the situation he was in and thinking about how difficult it must be for a parent to watch it happen.

Homeless man beaten at library / On life support; suspect in custody
July 28, 2007

A 45-year-old homeless man on Friday remained hospitalized in critical condition after having his head stomped on, allegedly by another homeless man, outside Lincoln Library Thursday night.

The victim was on life support at St. John’s Hospital, authorities said.

Robert B. Jones, 45, was arrested a short time after the attack.

He was charged with aggravated battery and is being held in the Sangamon County Jail on $200,000 bond.

The attack happened about 8:40 p.m. Thursday on the north side of the library, 326 S. Seventh St. Police have not said if they know what prompted the attack.

For more than a year, the library has been the center of a communitywide debate about how the city deals with its homeless population. A dozen or more homeless men and women have congregated on the property day and night, setting up sleeping areas on the plaza and keeping mounds of tarpaulin-wrapped belongings with them.

Police have received complaints about homeless people pestering passers-by, urinating on the outside of the building, fighting with each other and using drugs or alcohol.

The city this summer began paying for a storage unit elsewhere for the library homeless to keep their belongings during the day.

In addition, city workers began documenting all the homeless people at the library in order to try to help them with such needs as jobs, housing and transportation to other cities.

Sandy Robinson, the city’s director of community relations, who has been involved with the assistance effort, called Thursday’s attack disappointing.

“It’s sad and tragic, really, that we seem to be making progress with these issues on a number of fronts and seem to have outside influences that continue to throw up additional hurdles,” he said.

“This is what appears to be an incident that could have occurred virtually anywhere in the city – two individuals get into an altercation and something tragic happens. I don’t think it has anything to do with them being homeless, but it obviously is going to take on that perspective.”

Robinson said he is familiar with both men, but more so with Jones, who had been scheduled to meet Friday with city employees to talk about housing. Jones was a regular user of the storage unit – he was there as recently as 4:30 p.m. Thursday – and has had some “pretty significant interaction” with city employees.

Jones, who has a regular income, had stayed at one of the local shelters for a couple of weeks within the last month, but then returned to the street, Robinson said.

He said Jones was soft-spoken and withdrawn, and case managers who had talked to him thought the attack seemed out of character.

However, arrest records tell a different story.

Jones was arrested about 9:30 p.m. June 21 at Ninth and Carpenter streets, where he allegedly had attacked a 50-year-old stranger. A witness flagged down a patrol officer, who reported he had seen Jones kicking the man multiple times in the head and body.

When the officer ordered Jones to the ground so he could be arrested, Jones allegedly tucked his arms under his body so he couldn’t be handcuffed. He cooperated after the officer threatened to use pepper spray on him.

The victim said he had never seen or talked to Jones before.

Jones also was arrested May 18, after he and his girlfriend were caught trespassing at St. John’s Hospital. According to police, a security guard at the hospital about 9 a.m. told Jones and Dorothy J. Valentine, 46, who also is homeless, that they had to leave or be arrested for trespassing.

Six hours later, the guard found them having sex in a fifth-floor restroom and had them arrested.

Ward 5 Ald. Sam Cahnman, whose area includes the library, said that while he agrees Thursday night’s incident could happen anywhere, it’s more likely to happen where people congregate, which underscores the need to find a solution to the homeless problem at the library.

Cahnman is drafting an ordinance that would allow a homeless fund check-off on all City Water, Light and Power bills. Customers could choose to have their bills rounded up to the next dollar, and the difference would be used to help the homeless.

“I think there’s been a lot of improvement recently with the introduction of the (storage unit),” Cahnman said. “It seems like there are a lot fewer people out on the north end of the library than there used to be.”

Another ordinance awaiting city council approval would authorize the library to spend $18,050 on 16 security cameras to be installed inside and outside the building, including in the parking garage. Guards would monitor the cameras.

“It didn’t really have anything to do with the homeless, it’s just a security thing,” said Ernie Slottag, spokesman for the mayor’s office. “We have them on the other buildings already, and since the library is part of the municipal complex, it’s only fitting that they have them too.”

Robinson said he believes the attack will prompt some community discussion.

“I’m just hoping that, like many tragedies, that something positive can come from it,” he said.
Murder victim recalled fondly / Hadn’t always been homeless
July 31, 2007

It takes a special person to play Santa Claus effectively, but Timothy Ryan had what it takes.

He was cheery and compassionate – a real people person, said those who knew and loved him, including his father.

“I worked for the state, and one Christmas, he came walking past my office into the back area of the building where the state had a print shop, and he walked around and gave candy canes to all my employees, calling them by name,” an emotional Don Ryan recalled Monday.

“When he walked out of the building, he said, ‘Merry Christmas to all, and Merry Christmas to you, too, Don.’ It was three days before I realized it was him.”

Those are the type of memories that are helping Timothy Ryan’s family and friends cope with his murder.

Ryan, 45, died Friday after being beaten outside the north side of Lincoln Library the evening before. The attacker stomped on Ryan’s head for reasons unknown, police said. A homeless man, Robert B. Jones, is being held in the attack.

Ryan, who also was homeless, at one time worked in mail and messenger service for the Illinois Department of Central Management Services and in the duplicating area for the state Department of Professional Regulation.

His father said his son’s death is difficult to talk about and declined to discuss the circumstances of Ryan’s homelessness.

“This is a celebration of life, and we want to talk about the good aspects. That’s the way I want to remember him,” Don Ryan said. “I hope something good comes of it with the library situation. It’s very unfortunate, and some of those people are wonderful people.”

Charges against Jones, 45, were upgraded to first-degree murder on Monday. He made his first appearance in court and did not respond to any questions from Associate Circuit Judge Robert Hall, instead standing still with his head cocked to the right.

First assistant state’s attorney Steve Weinhoeft cited Jones’ 29 prior arrests and eight convictions dating back to 1980 in asking that his bond be increased to $500,000 from $200,000. Hall agreed.

Jones had been charged with aggravated battery, but Weinhoeft asked the court to dismiss that charge in favor of three counts of first-degree murder.

Jones’ last conviction was for misdemeanor battery earlier this year.

Hall appointed the Sangamon County public defender’s office to represent Jones. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Aug. 16.

The attack on Ryan happened about 8:40 p.m. Thursday. Police have not yet said what they believe prompted it.

“We’re still trying to determine the exact motive,” said Springfield police spokesman Sgt. Pat Ross.

Sangamon County Coroner Susan Boone said an autopsy showed the fatal injury was to the back of Ryan’s head behind his ear. She said he had no other injuries.

Steve Brown, spokesman for House Speaker Michael Madigan, D-Chicago, on Monday said he knew Timothy Ryan in the 1990s from Play It Again Sam’s, a bar that used to be on Monroe Street near the Stratton Building. Brown said he wanted people who may have encountered Ryan to be able to put a face to his name.

“He was a funny and kind of playful guy. Like just about anybody, when he had too much to drink, he could be kind of obnoxious,” Brown said.

“I knew he had taken a turn sort of for the worst, but I don’t know that he ever was a menace to anybody or harmed anybody, and he certainly didn’t deserve the fate it is alleged he was dealt.”

Broken life: Jerry Gaston’s story

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Jerry Gaston became a quadriplegic after an unlicensed, uninsured driver fleeing from police crashed into the car Gaston was riding in and paralyzed him.

Gaston sued the driver and the city of Springfield in circuit court and won the largest verdict in Sangamon County history. The money should have been enough to take care of all his medical and personal needs for the rest of his life.

Gaston has never seen a penny and probably never will.

Of all the work I’ve done at The State Journal-Register, this is the story I’m most proud to have told. I wish I could have done more for Jerry and his family.

Photographer T.J. Salsman documented Jerry’s life in photos. This was my first attempt at narrative writing on a significant news story.

Broken life / Reckless driver forever changes Jerry Gaston’s world
Aug. 27, 2006

Jerry Gaston’s eyes flutter open about 4 a.m. most days.

He wishes he could sleep longer, but painful muscle spasms jar him awake. Four to five hours of sleep a night is all he can manage.

He can hear his fiancee, Minnie Blue-Bond – his wife for all intents and purposes – breathing heavily next to him. Occasionally, he hears one of the children stir in the next bedroom.

He can’t see out the window behind his head, but he can tell dawn is breaking from the way the hues in the room change and from the furious chirping of birds outside.

He orders his arms and legs to move, but they don’t. He longs to be able to go to the bathroom by himself. Instead, he lies in bed and stares at the ceiling.

Trapped in a broken body, he must wait until someone can help him sit up in bed. Sometimes one of the children in the house will wander in, reach for Jerry’s wrists, get some traction on the floor and pull him up into a sitting position on the edge of the bed.

Other times he must wait for Minnie to wake up or for her son, Carlos, who took on the role of Jerry’s caretaker, to come by the house and get him up, dress him and lift him into an electric wheelchair. The process can take an hour or two, depending on how things go.

Jerry is a quadriplegic. He has been paralyzed from the neck down since May 5, 2002, when a man with a history of traffic violations and criminal activity ran a stop sign and crashed into a car Jerry was in. The man was being followed by two Springfield police officers who had seen him run a stop light at 15th Street and South Grand Avenue and tried to pull him over.

The impact snapped Jerry’s neck, fracturing three vertebrae and damaging his spinal cord. An 8-inch surgery scar runs from the base of his neck to just below his shoulders from where his doctor, Stephen Pineda, repaired the injury. He almost died in the hospital the morning of the crash when his heart stopped beating and he developed respiratory failure.

After nearly two months of hospitalization and physical therapy, Jerry went home, but not as the same man he was before the accident. He never will walk again, and the injuries probably shortened his lifespan. He is 47. National health statistics show he probably will live until his early 70s.

Years stretch out before him. He faces each day knowing he can’t do the things he loves to do, things that make a man feel like a man – catch a fish, go to work, put on a tie, mow the yard, make love. No more bike rides, no more roughhousing with the seven adopted and foster children who live with him and Minnie.

“My life has changed a whole lot,” Jerry said. “There’s things I used to do I can’t do anymore.

“The kids and I used to go fishing. Now I can’t do any of that. I used to fire up the grill. I can’t get on the grill anymore. I can sit there and watch people cook, and if they don’t know how I tell them how.”

At 6 feet 3 inches and 220 pounds, Jerry almost seems too big for his electric wheelchair. It can’t get wet and it will take him only as far as the batteries last, but it’s the only means of freedom for a man whose body has become his prison.

Jerry, whose closest friends and family sometimes call him by his middle name, “Wayne,” grew up in Calhoun, Miss., and moved to Springfield about nine years ago to be with Minnie.

He has five sisters and two brothers and has met his father only twice in his life. He made it through 11th grade but was suspended in high school for pulling a girl’s wig off her head. He never went back because he got a job hauling “pupwood,” Mississippi slang for wood used to make paper.

After that he had a series of other low-paying jobs – pouring concrete, landscaping, cutting timber, working in a factory making couch frames, transferring bananas off boats onto trailers and farm work. At the time of the accident he was a steward at the Hilton Springfield, earning $7.75 an hour. The job didn’t come with health insurance.

He loves Minnie. They planned to get married just before the accident. Jerry still is legally married to a woman in Mississippi and intended to go there and press for a divorce, but the crash happened and all the plans were put on hold. He says the Mississippi woman knows he is paralyzed but still hasn’t granted him a divorce.

Jerry sits quietly in his chair, and there’s a despondence about him. He occasionally lights up at a joke and will let out a hoarse laugh. He used to be more playful and ornery, according to Minnie.

“Before he got hurt, he was that same typical high school boy, into everything,” she said. “He made me so mad, sometimes I chased him out of the house with a broom. I’d be doing something and he’d come in and just irritate everybody and everything, then he’d take off out the door. He’s just an old spoiled brat.”

But now, “When he’s in a lot of pain, he gets irritable. When we know he’s grouchy, we just kind of stay away from him or ignore him.”

He takes about a dozen pills a day, including painkillers, muscle relaxers, allergy medicine and others. He drifts in and out of sleep in his chair during the day and snores loudly when he naps. He keeps an eye on the children, calling out to Minnie if one of them is getting into something. Sometimes he blocks the doorway to the living room so they can’t scamper off.

The children love him, wheelchair and all. When he greets them at their school bus stop, they hop on the sides of the chair and ride with him back to the house or stop at a park on the way. They accompany him to the grocery store when he goes shopping for Minnie.

“It was all I could do when he was in the hospital to keep them from up there where he was at,” Minnie said. “I didn’t want them to see him like he was in intensive care.

“There were so many machines, he couldn’t talk to them. I was scared it would devastate them.”

Jerry won’t discuss the night of the crash, not even with Minnie. After four years, he still hasn’t discussed it with his friend, Orrin Holman, who was driving the car he was in that night.

“Sometimes he rides over here and we sit outside and talk. We never talk about the accident. To this day we’ve never talked about the accident,” said Orrin, who also was injured. “I asked him to ride with me (that night), so I feel like a little bit of this is my fault.”

Jerry and Orrin relived the ordeal earlier this year when a civil lawsuit they filed against the driver who ran the stop sign, the city of Springfield and the two police officers went before a jury in Sangamon County Circuit Court.

After eight days of testimony and two hours of deliberation, the jury determined Jerry was entitled to $24.5 million in damages, a record award in Sangamon County. But they decided the money should come from the driver, not the city of Springfield.

The driver, Derek Brown, is a Southeast High School dropout who is in the Sangamon County Jail because of a similar incident Christmas morning. He has no driver’s license and no auto insurance. Jerry’s chances of ever seeing a penny from the verdict are slim. His attorney has begun the process of appealing.

By the time the suit went to trial, Jerry’s medical bills already had reached more than $414,000. The cost of caring for him for the rest of his life is estimated to be somewhere between $4.7 million and $10.3 million.

Minnie does what she can to make ends meet. She shops sales, puts two-sizes-too-big coats for the kids on layaway when she finds them at clearance prices, makes food that will get the family through several meals at a time. Occasionally, she has had to seek help with bills, especially when natural gas prices got so high last winter.

Jerry has a medical card and receives social security income. Minnie also receives social security income and about $3,700 a month from the government to help her provide for the children.

But the bills keep coming.

She filed bankruptcy in October because Jerry’s medical bills had mounted so high and debt collectors were hounding her. She just couldn’t take it anymore, she said. It was granted in April.

Minnie is trying to save enough money to rent a hotel room so she and Carlos can give Jerry a proper bath in a handicapped-accessible bathroom. He usually gets sponge baths, but from time to time he needs to be submerged in water, Minnie said. Jerry’s wheelchair will not fit through the doorway of the tiny main-floor bathroom in their home on Paul Street.

The bathroom sink is broken, so the family uses the bathtub faucet for washing hands and brushing teeth. They’ll have the sink repaired when they save up some money, they say. There is a second bathroom in the basement where the kids take showers.

Chunks of plaster are missing in the hallway and from the door frame of Minnie and Jerry’s bedroom. The doorway is just wide enough for the wheelchair to fit through, but it does require some skill on Jerry’s part to line the chair up just right. Sometimes he has to line it up two or three times before he can get out of the room. Scuffmarks on the wall are evidence of the tight fit.

Workers from the Springfield Center for Independent Living built a wheelchair ramp on the front of the house after Minnie, Carlos and a caregiver accidentally dropped Jerry on his back while carrying him down the front steps in his wheelchair not long after he was sent home from the hospital. His doctor was so upset that he got Jerry bumped up on a list of people who needed ramps built.

The ramp makes life easier, but the front storm door opens into the ramp, complicating Jerry’s comings and goings.

Jerry travels only on rare occasions because the family’s 1993 GMC van is not equipped with a wheelchair lift. Minnie’s son used to pull the wheelchair and Jerry up into the van but had to stop after injuring his own back doing so.

When the weather is cold, Jerry spends his days and nights mostly cooped up in the house. But as soon as it warms up, he spends hours outside in his yard, soaking up the fresh air. Besides going to the bus stop and park with the children, he sometimes rides to the grocery store to do some shopping.

Does he struggle to come to terms with what happened to him?

“No,” he said calmly, adjusting himself in his wheelchair.

Does he just accept it?

“I have to,” he said.

Can he be thankful for anything?

He pauses.

“Just that I’m living,” he said, “and that Dr. Pineda did a good job on me, you know.”

2002 accident that resulted in Jerry W. Gaston’s paralysis
 Aug. 27, 2006

Sequence of events

1. About 1:40 a.m. May 5, 2002, patrol officers see Derek L. Brown speeding southbound on 15th Street across Brown Street. Brown stops for, then runs a red light at 15th Street and South Grand Avenue. Officers begin following the car.

2. Brown runs the stop sign at South 13th and Spruce streets. Officers activate overhead lights and notify dispatch of a traffic stop. The siren was used only at intersections.

3. Brown runs the stop sign at Loveland Avenue and Spruce Street and turns off his headlights while approaching 11th Street.

4. Brown runs the stop sign at 11th and Spruce streets. He then collides with a northbound car driven by Orrin W. Holman. Jerry W. Gaston was a passenger in this car. The impact pushes Holman’s car into a third car driven by Michael A. Perkins. Seven people were injured in the accident.

Wrong place, wrong time / Night unfolds in tragedy for six
 Aug. 27, 2006

Something must have fallen out of the sky onto his car, a dazed and bleeding Orrin Holman thought as he lay in the wreckage of his Lincoln Continental.

Maybe it was a tree. One second he was driving up 11th Street. The next second … BAM!

He could hear his friend, his “road dog,” Jerry Gaston, moaning from the back seat. Holman asked if he was OK.

“I can’t move my neck,” Gaston responded.

Holman, in severe pain himself, blacked out, waking up only when he heard the sound of the Jaws of Life as firefighters tried to free the two men from the car. Gaston and Holman were taken to the hospital, as were four other innocent motorists and the reckless driver who caused the crash.

Doctors later determined Gaston was paralyzed from the neck down. Holman had a broken hip and pelvis. Four Springfield teenagers returning from singing with their church choir in Carbondale had injuries ranging from glass embedded in their skin and eyes to fractured bones.

If ever anyone was in the wrong place at the wrong time, it was these six.

Four years later, their bodies still are healing, medical bills remain unpaid and they continue to wait for an apology.

***

In the hours preceding the crash, the victims were at home, returning to Springfield or resting after a hard day’s work. Their paths crossed at 11th and Spruce streets at 1:42 a.m. May 5, 2002.

12:30 A.M.

Orrin Holman was relaxing on his sofa, watching a movie on television. It was Saturday night, and he wasn’t quite ready to go to bed.

About 12:30 a.m. Sunday, his phone rang. A friend wanted to know if he could give him a ride to his girlfriend’s house to pick up his truck. Holman agreed. About 25 minutes later, he pulled into the friend’s driveway, across the street from Jerry Gaston’s house on Paul Street.

Gaston had returned home from working a double shift at his job as a steward at the Hilton Springfield and was sitting outside under his carport, enjoying the night. He called out to Holman.

Holman’s friend said he was ready to go. Holman asked Gaston if he felt like riding along.

“No problem,” Gaston said.

The friend got in the front passenger seat of Holman’s silver Lincoln Continental with “BIG O 38″ on the license plates. Gaston climbed into the back seat behind Holman.

When they pulled up at the girlfriend’s house on Bryn Mawr Boulevard, they noticed several people gathered outside, one of whom had a baseball bat.

The friend, it turned out, hadn’t quite told Holman the full story about why he needed a ride to pick up his truck. He left out the part about how he’d gotten in a fight with his girlfriend earlier and left when she called police.

Holman and Gaston weren’t looking for trouble; they only intended to do Holman’s friend a favor. Holman told the friend to get out of the car, that he and Gaston were leaving before things got out of hand.

“Just stay in the back,” Holman told Gaston as they pulled away. “There’s no need for us to get in any trouble.”

They headed back for Jerry’s house. Holman stopped on Bryn Mawr at 11th Street, then turned north. Three blocks up the road, he saw his friend’s truck lights come up behind him, then go around the Continental. Holman got in the curb lane and drove on.

The friend made the green light at Ash Street, but it turned red before Holman got there.

“This is your last limousine ride. Don’t get used to it,” Holman wisecracked to Gaston in the back.

The radio on the Continental didn’t work, and Holman had the front windows cracked because it was a pleasant night. He drove through the green light at Laurel and approached Spruce Street.

There was nothing – no revving of engines, no squealing of tires on pavement, no sirens, no flashing lights reflecting off the buildings – to warn that a westbound car was about to crash into them. All they heard was a loud bang and the sound of metal twisting.

10 P.M.

Casey Joy, Michael Perkins, Marqueta Stewart and Latricia Ousley had sung the Lord’s praises earlier that Saturday evening.

They and other members of the choir from Love Deliverance Evangelistic Church had driven that afternoon to Carbondale, where their pastor was scheduled to preach at a church fellowship. The teenagers jumped at the chance to get out of Springfield for the day.

After the service, the church served a meal and the Springfield group gathered in their cars about 10 p.m. to make the 170-mile drive home.

Along the way, the four-car caravan of choir members pulled in at a gas station for fuel and to let the riders stretch their legs. Some of them switched vehicles. Perkins got into the driver’s seat of Ousley’s car.

The plan was for the caravan to head back to the church, and from there the members would make their way home.

The four friends chatted, eager to get home. The girls eventually fell asleep, and Perkins and Joy continued talking. Perkins drove up Interstate 55 to Stevenson Drive, then turned north onto 11th Street. The windows were cracked, and the radio was on low.

They didn’t know what hit them.

“I didn’t see anything at all,” Perkins said. “All I remember is hearing a boom, and I was knocked unconscious. I don’t remember hearing a siren, and I don’t remember seeing any lights flashing.”

Joy didn’t see anything either.

“All I remember was waking up and the police officer flashing a light in my face,” he said.

They later would learn that a red Dodge Spirit, driven by an unlicensed, uninsured man named Derek Brown, ran the westbound stop sign on Spruce Street, crashed into Holman’s silver Lincoln Continental and sent it slamming into the side of Ousley’s Buick Century.

1:40 A.M.

Derek Brown set out for his girlfriend’s house, driving her red 1993 Dodge Spirit. He’d been at a friend’s house near 15th and Stuart streets.

Two Springfield police officers, Chris Stout and April Smiddy, were sitting in a marked patrol car about a block away at 16th and Brown streets with the headlights off. They watched the Dodge heading south on 15th Street as it crossed Brown. The car was going fast enough that it caught Stout’s attention, so he put the squad car in gear and began rolling forward along the curb.

The officers watched the car stop momentarily at a red light on 15th Street at South Grand Avenue, as if to check for cross traffic, then go through the light while it was still red.

The officers decided to stop the vehicle and give the driver a citation for running a red light. They watched him turn right onto Spruce Street, blocks ahead, and continued following. Then they watched the car run a stop sign at 13th and Spruce, at which point they activated the overhead lights on the squad car and tried to close the gap between them and the Dodge.

The officers turned on one of the squad car’s sirens but kept it on only when they approached intersections. Smiddy radioed dispatchers in between siren wails that they were trying to stop a car.

Around 12th and Spruce, the headlights on Brown’s car went off. He later testified in a deposition that a floor mat got caught under his accelerator, and the headlights went off when he tried to turn on the dome light so he could see the mat. He initially denied that he was trying to elude the officers.

Seconds later, Brown ran the stop sign on Spruce at 11th Street and sped into the intersection, where the Spirit crashed into the side of Holman’s Lincoln, thrusting it into the side of the car carrying the four teenagers.

A moment later, as the two police officers pulled up, Smiddy radioed dispatchers that there’d been a “10-50,” an auto accident. Stout told Brown to stay put, and he and Smiddy checked on the victims. Ambulances were on the way.

In an October 2002 deposition with Bruce Beeman, the lawyer for Holman and Gaston, Stout testified that he didn’t remember whether Holman or Gaston said anything to him at the crash scene.

“From your observation of the crash scene, was there anything Orrin Holman, the driver of the car that was hit by the suspect red vehicle, was there anything he could have done to avoid this?” Beeman asked Stout.

“I don’t know sir. From what I saw, no.”

Brown testified during a deposition that he had been speeding to his girlfriend’s house at 11th Street and Loveland Avenue so he could get out of the car and go inside before the officers pulled him over. While he initially testified he didn’t know a police car was behind him, he later admitted he saw that it was a police car when he was on 12th Street. He said the patrol car had no overhead or headlights on.

“It was like they was trying to sneak up on me,” Brown said in the deposition. “They didn’t want me to know that they was following me. But I knew it was them.”

THE AFTERMATH

All seven motorists were taken by ambulance to Memorial Medical Center.

Brown suffered a bloody lip and a broken shoulder blade, which required his arm to be in a sling. He was released from the hospital three days after the crash and was taken to the Sangamon County Jail.

Joy, now 21 and a hair stylist, has scars on his right arm, mostly near his wrist, from shards of glass that had to be removed. Ousley had glass in her eye, and Stewart had a broken collarbone.

Perkins, also 21, suffered fractured ribs that left him in pain for weeks. He was treated and released from the hospital the day of the crash and given medicine to help relieve the pain. He had no insurance and still owes on his medical bills. He is a manager at a McDonald’s.

“I still have to tell people not to touch or slap my chest,” he said.

“For a couple months, driving down that part of the street, I would always think about the crash. Sometimes Casey and I’d be in the car together, and he’d point and say, ‘Hey, Michael … Spruce Street.’ I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I know.’ ”

Holman suffered a fractured hip and broken pelvis on his right side as well as two herniated discs that he can’t afford to have repaired. He was off work from his job at the Illinois Secretary of State for nine months. Creditors pursued him for unpaid bills. He filed bankruptcy in March 2004. Friends stopped coming around. He stopped answering the phone and said he contemplated suicide.

Gaston remained hospitalized for almost two months after an initial surgery to stabilize his broken neck. He never will walk again.

Holman still has occasional flashbacks to the accident. He rarely drives at night anymore.

Then there’s the guilt.

“Every time I see Jerry in that wheelchair, I’m in pain because I believe part of this is my fault,” he said. “I asked him to ride with me.”

Violations are a never-ending story for Brown
 Aug 27, 2006

Just six months after Derek Brown was paroled from prison for the crash that paralyzed Jerry Gaston, he fled from police and nearly crashed into another car, authorities say. The resulting charges were just more in a long string of traffic offenses.

On this day, Christmas morning 2005, Brown fled from a Springfield police officer at speeds topping out at 90 mph on Taylor Avenue and just missed hitting a car when he ran a red light at Stevenson Drive, according to police.

A Springfield police officer sitting in the parking lot of Southeast High School about 3:10 a.m. watched a white Chevrolet truck speeding southbound on Taylor Avenue. The officer pulled out and began following Brown, who continued to pick up speed, police said.

Brown allegedly changed lanes frequently without signaling and crossed the middle line multiple times. As the truck recklessly approached Stanton Street, the officer activated the lights and sirens on his squad car.

Brown allegedly sped through a red light there and continued speeding south. He drove through a red light at Stevenson and nearly struck a blue two-door car that was heading east on Stevenson, police said.

Brown then drove the truck over the median and pulled into the parking lot of an apartment complex at 110 West Lake Shore Drive. He allegedly jumped out of the truck and ran from the officer, who chased him but lost sight of Brown behind a tattoo shop.

Other officers arrived and found Brown hiding in some bushes on the south side of a house along the road. The officers threatened to stun him with a Taser if he didn’t come out with his hands up. He surrendered, police said.

Officers found a loaded blue steel .22-caliber revolver sitting in plain view on the driver’s side floorboard of the truck, according to the police account of the incident.

Sangamon County court records show Brown, 26, has received 57 traffic tickets since 1997. Of those, 17 have been for driving on a suspended license. He has not had a valid driver’s license since 1997, when the Illinois Secretary of State’s office suspended it because he failed to appear in court.

In 2002 the secretary of state issued a “safety responsibility suspension,” apparently as a result of his role in the crash that paralyzed Jerry Gaston. In 2005, the state issued an “unsatisfied judgment suspension” because Brown didn’t pay a court judgment.

He also has a criminal record, including arrests for battery, unlawful use of weapons, disorderly conduct, marijuana possession, domestic battery and theft. He was sentenced to six years in state prison for aggravated reckless driving for the crash that injured Gaston and five others. He served three years and was paroled in June 2005.

Sangamon County State’s Attorney John Schmidt declined to comment on Brown’s driving record or what can be done to keep reckless drivers off the road, saying he didn’t want to appear biased since Brown’s Christmas morning case is pending.

“Recidivism is an issue we deal with on a daily basis, and we seek sentences that are fair and just and do our very best in that effort,” Schmidt said.

Brown did not respond to written requests for an interview that were mailed to his home and to the Sangamon County Jail.

However, Illinois Rep. Chapin Rose, R-Mahomet, offered his take on Brown and other drivers like him. Rose, a former prosecutor in Champaign County, recently sponsored a bill that stiffened the penalties for driving uninsured. He said he was “completely outraged” by Brown’s conduct.

“The problem with this whole thing is that people make a career out of being misdemeanants. They’re idiots and have no concern for themselves, let alone anyone else,” Rose said. “And over time, in the worst-case scenario, it can have life-altering consequences for some guy that happens to run into them.”

Rose said it all comes back to the same question: How does society deal with people who don’t care about what society thinks?

“I will say that it is an extremely vexing problem because by its very nature these people don’t care what the state legislature does or thinks, and if they have to go to prison for two years they don’t care,” he said. “They’ve proved that.

“They don’t care about anybody or anything. And so what happens is we end up writing more and more laws to put them in prison and as soon as they get out they go right back to doing what got them in prison in the first place.”

Brown has been in Sangamon County Jail since his Christmas arrest. His bond was set at $25,000. A trial is scheduled for Oct. 16. His attorney, Scott Hanken, declined to comment on the case because it is pending.

3-year-old badly beaten on Father’s Day

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Three-year-old Cameron Cleeton had to be in a partial body cast after his mother’s boyfriend badly beat him on Father’s Day in June 2007. I was invited to Cameron’s grandmother’s home, where the boy was staying, to talk about how he was doing and how the family was coping. They mentioned how the Cameron had been looking forward to going to an upcoming monster truck rally in town but now they weren’t sure they would be able to go because of his injuries and mobility issues.

SJ-R readers came through again with offers of help, and the organizers of the monster truck rally arranged for Cameron to meet the driver of his favorite truck, “Grave Digger.”

Stepfather allegedly beats 3-year-old boy / Child undergoes surgery, has broken leg, cuts
June 19, 2007

A 3-year-old boy was hospitalized Sunday night with a broken leg, bruises and cuts after his stepfather allegedly beat him on Father’s Day.

The boy required surgery Monday, and his condition was unknown late in the day.

Jessie S. Fishburn, 20, of the 3200 block of East Enos Avenue was in Sangamon County Jail, charged with aggravated battery to a child. Bond was set Monday at $75,000.

The incident happened between 9:30 and 10 p.m. Sunday at the family’s mobile home on East Enos Avenue. Authorities were sent to St. John’s Hospital about 10 p.m. after emergency room workers notified them a boy there had injuries consistent with child abuse.

The boy suffered a broken left thighbone, bruising and red marks over most of his body and a cut above one ear.

The boy’s mother was not involved and was not at home at the time, authorities said. One other child lives in the home but apparently was not injured.

Sangamon County sheriff’s Capt. Jack Campbell said investigators were not releasing details about the alleged abuse, including with what the boy was beaten, how many times he was hit and who took him to the hospital.

Campbell said Fishburn was “cooperative” with the investigation.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services also is investigating. An agency spokesman said Monday caseworkers had no prior contact with the family.

According to the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, the thighbone is the largest and strongest bone in the body. Common causes of child femur fractures include falling on the playground, taking a hit in contact sports, being in a car crash or child abuse.

Fishburn’s preliminary hearing is scheduled for July 5. Aggravated battery to a child is a Class X felony punishable by six to 30 years in prison.

Fishburn is on a parole hold from the Illinois Department of Corrections, meaning that even if he posts bail he cannot be released from jail. He was paroled May 16, 2006, after being sentenced to three years in prison for illegal use of a weapon and possession of a stolen firearm in 2005 in Sangamon County.

He also was arrested in 2004 for vehicular endangerment.

Beaten toddler in partial body cast
June 21, 2007

The 3-year-old boy who allegedly was battered by his mother’s boyfriend on Father’s Day is in a partial body cast to repair the broken thighbone he suffered, his grandmother said Wednesday.

Cameron Cleeton-Wilson has a lingering footprint on his right thigh, bruises on his buttocks and a cut over his ear that is healing, according to his grandmother, Shirley Holloway, of Springfield.

The boy’s cast extends from his right foot to just above his belly button, and he is living at his grandparents’ home while he recovers, she said. His mother works and has another child to care for, and the Holloways are stepping in to help.

“He’s mostly in bed,” she said. “He can’t put any pressure on his leg or anything. I have to give him a sponge bath because he can’t take a bath. He can’t stand up.”

While Cameron is on the road to physical recovery, he has mental scars that must heal, too.

“He has dreams and cries in the middle of the night. He’ll say, ‘Don’t make me go back to the trailer, Grandma,’” Holloway said, her voice cracking with emotion. “I’ve just been trying to keep him comfortable, letting him watch cartoons, trying to get his mind off his leg.”

Cameron was rushed to St. John’s Hospital on Sunday night after his injuries were discovered. The alleged abuse happened between 9:30 and 10 p.m. at the family’s mobile home in the 3200 block of East Enos Avenue.

He was at home with his mother’s boyfriend, Jessie S. Fishburn, 20, while she was at work, authorities said. Emergency room workers notified authorities after determining Cameron’s injuries were consistent with child abuse.

Detectives at the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office will not say specifically what they believe transpired, but they arrested Fishburn, and he has been charged with aggravated battery to a child. His bond was set at $75,000, but even if he posts bail, he cannot be released from jail because of a parole hold. His preliminary hearing is set for July 5.

Members of Fishburn’s family said Wednesday he is on suicide watch at the jail.

His mother, Kim Uhrin, who lives out of state, said in an e-mail to The State Journal-Register that Fishburn did not break the child’s leg and that “those kids are his world and it is hurting him so bad to know his son is hurt.”

Cameron’s 1-year-old half sister also lives in the home and was not injured. She is Fishburn’s biological daughter with Cameron’s mother, Sheena Cleeton.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services is investigating. A spokesman said this week that the agency has had no previous contact with the family.

Holloway said doctors are hopeful that Cameron’s femur will grow back together. If not, they will have to perform surgery to put in a pin.

She said Cameron is a happy, loveable, brown-eyed little boy who loves to play, watch NASCAR and work in the garden with his grandpa.

For now, the family is trying to figure out whether they can take him to this weekend’s O’Reilly Auto Parts Midwest 4-Wheel Jamboree monster truck event at the Illinois State Fairgrounds, an event he had been looking forward to for some time. Cameron’s injuries put the outing in limbo, though.

Cameron is a big monster truck fan and even has a favorite truck – Grave Digger.

Holloway said the family bought a wagon for the boy to sit in so that he can at least go outside, but they’re not sure they will be able to take it into the Grandstand and find a comfortable place for him to sit. They can’t carry him into the stands, she said, because of the pressure it would put on the cast.

The event is expected to draw 1,000 four-wheel-drive vehicles and monster trucks to the fairgrounds.

Holloway said the family has been through a lot the last few days and they thank people for their thoughts and prayers.

“This has never happened to us before. It affected me so bad,” she said. “How could somebody do something to this little boy who is so defenseless?”

Cameron will see monster trucks / VIP treatment for injured 3-year-old
June 22, 2007

Cameron Cleeton-Wilson has something fun to look forward to this weekend.

The 3-year-old is in a partial body cast because of the broken thighbone he suffered on Father’s Day when, authorities say, his mother’s boyfriend battered him at the family’s mobile home on Enos Avenue.

The boyfriend was arrested and is in Sangamon County Jail.

Prior to the attack, Cameron had been looking forward to going to this weekend’s O’Reilly Auto Parts Midwest 4-Wheel Jamboree monster truck event at the Illinois State Fairgrounds. He was particularly looking forward to seeing his favorite monster truck, Grave Digger.

But because of mobility issues, Cameron’s grandparents were not sure they would be able to take him. His grandmother, Shirley Holloway, who is caring for him as he recovers, said Wednesday she was not sure the family would be able to carry Cameron or pull him in a wagon up to the bleachers.

On Thursday, many concerned people who read about Cameron in The State Journal-Register tried to find a way to get the boy to the show and be the center of some special attention.

Their efforts paid off.

Jessica Hubley, an event promoter with Indianapolis-based Family Events, which produces this weekend’s monster truck event, said she had received an e-mail from a reader who forwarded the story and asked if there was anything that could be done. By afternoon, about 15 people had called Hubley about Cameron’s situation.

“I’ve never dealt with this before. I’ve never had this kind of thing happen, but the second I heard about it, right off the bat I knew we had to make sure we contacted Cameron’s family and extended an offer for him, pending whether he feels well enough to come out,” Hubley said.

“We wanted to make sure he got the VIP treatment because it was a terrible thing that happened to him.”

Not only is the Grave Digger crew putting together a package of T-shirts, hats and gear for Cameron, he is going to receive a private meet-and-greet with the truck’s crew, including driver Pablo Huffaker, and he and his family will be able to sit in the announcer’s booth to watch the show.

The family also received VIP passes to get into the event from John Henton, manager of one of the Springfield O’Reilly stores.

Holloway on Thursday said she was surprised by and thankful for the outpouring of support.

“I told him he’s going to go see Monster Jam, and he said, ‘Yeah! Vroom! Vroom!’ He’s all excited,” she said.

Cameron continues to be in pain and discomfort from his injuries, Holloway said as she tried to scratch an itch on his leg under the cast. He later started crying from the pain in his leg.

The child was at home with his mother’s boyfriend, Jessie S. Fishburn, 20, Sunday night when the alleged abuse happened.

Detectives at the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office will not say specifically what they believe transpired, but they arrested Fishburn, and he has been charged with aggravated battery to a child. His bond was set at $75,000, but even if he posts bail, he cannot be released because of a parole hold.

Cameron was rushed to a hospital emergency room after his injuries were discovered. Workers there notified authorities after determining the injuries were consistent with child abuse.

In addition to the broken bone, he had a footprint on his right thigh, bruises on his buttocks and a cut over his ear.

Fishburn reportedly has been on suicide watch at the jail. His family has said he is innocent.

Broken life: Part 2

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Part 1 of the “Victim of circumstance” series was about Jerry’s life now, what unfolded the night of the crash and Derek Brown’s history as a reckless driver and his brushes with the law.

Part 2 examined the relationship between Jerry and his fiancee and caretaker, Minnie Blue Bond, as well as the legal battle, Jerry’s injuries and his prospects for the future.

Spinal cord injury leaves Gaston with few options
 Aug. 28, 2006

Snap a pencil in half, and you’re left with two pieces of wood with a lead core running through the center. Firmly bind the two pieces back together, and there’s a good chance you can continue using the pencil with no trouble.

Now imagine your spinal column with the spinal cord running through the center – something like a pencil with a piece of licorice inside.

Had Jerry Gaston’s vertebrae simply fractured as a result of the crash in May 2002, he might have walked away. But in his case, three bones in his neck broke and dislocated from each other, stretching and pulling and putting pressure on his spinal cord.

Doctors rushed to stabilize the injury when Gaston got to the hospital. They used a device that applied traction and allowed them to realign the bone to prevent further damage to the cord. His surgeon, Dr. Stephen Pineda, then performed surgery to repair and stabilize the fracture with a series of plates, screws and rods.

Despite doctors’ efforts, the damage was permanent and irreversible. Gaston lost function of everything the spinal cord controls from his neck on down, including arm and leg movement, use of his chest and abdominal muscles, and control over his bowel, bladder and sexual functions.

If the injury had been higher, as in the case of deceased actor Christopher Reeve, Gaston also would not have been able to move his head and neck and would have been unable to breathe without a ventilator.

“It’s devastating. The spinal cord will not regenerate. It’s not like bone, which will regenerate,” Pineda said. “When you have a dislocated neck, we know that the spinal cord is undergoing continuous damage.”

Gaston was hospitalized for two months as he tried to recover from the injury and subsequent complications, such as persistent pneumonia. He underwent two weeks of physical therapy and rehabilitation at the hospital, then went home.

Initially, he could only shrug his shoulders. In September 2002, he regained some use of his lower extremities, so he returned to the hospital the following February for additional rehabilitation. He also regained some use of his upper extremities. He was sent home again later that month but continued therapy as an outpatient.

He has enough use of his right arm that he can operate his electric wheelchair, and he can sometimes feed himself. He is able to stand for a second or two with support, but that’s it.

“He has some nerves that are working, and that’s wonderful,” Pineda said. “But if there’s no functional outcome from it … scientifically, it gives a sense of hope, but what can you do with it?”

Gaston will require round-the-clock help for the rest of his life. It is unknown how much it will cost in the course of his lifetime for his family to care for him, keep him comfortable and stave off complications from the injury. Estimates by a rehabilitation consultant range between $4.7 million and $10.3 million.

That includes the costs of doctors’ visits and evaluations, visiting nurses, someone to make house repairs and care for the lawn, a van and van maintenance, home renovations, wheelchairs, wheelchair batteries, bedside toilets, catheters, gloves, tissues, cotton swabs, nebulizers to help him breathe, medicine for everything from pain and anxiety to allergies and indigestion, and dozens of other items for his physical, psychological, social and safety needs.

His medical expenses amounted to $414,287 from the time of the crash up to when a civil lawsuit he filed against the offending driver, the city of Springfield and two police officers went to trial.

Pineda said patients like Gaston often go through a variety of phases after they become paralyzed, from the “what do I do now?” phase to the “why me” and the “what if” phases.

“He was depressed. Anybody would be depressed. It’s quite a change,” he said. “Everything is different. Going to the bathroom – you can’t do it without getting somebody to help you. Making a phone call – you’ve got to get somebody to dial the phone, put it to your ear and when you’re done, hang it up for you.

“All the things that were simple before now are becoming an obstacle.”

Gaston’s recovery prospects are few. Advances in medical and computer technology, such as vans that can be driven by voice commands or spinal cord bypasses, could improve his life, but whether he’ll be able to take advantage of them remains to be seen.

He could be too old by the time they become available on the market.

“Right now, for a guy in his late 40s, the future is very limited, other than being an experimental person for the next generation to come,” Pineda said.

Gaston’s injury
Aug. 28, 2006

Spinal cord injuries to the cervical nerves most often result in quadriplegia, paralysis from the neck down. Damage to the thoracic nerves and below, often result in paraplegia, meaning hand control is not affected. In Jerry Gaston’s case, spinal injury occurred in the cervical region, around vertebrae C2, C3 and C4, causing him initially to lose function of his arms, legs, chest and abdominal muscles. He has regained a limited amount of movement in his extremities.

  • Skull
  • Spinal cord
  • Vertebral body
  • Intervertebral disc
  • Dura (thecal sac)
  • Spinous process
  • Conus medullaris
  • Cauda equina
  • Cervical nerves
  • Head and neck
  • Diaphram
  • Deltoids, biceps
  • Wrist extenders
  • Triceps
  • Hand
  • Thoracic nerves
  • Chest muscles
  • Abdominal muscles
  • Lumbar nerves
  • Leg muscles
  • Sacral nerves
  • Bowel and bladder
  • Sexual function

Gaston suffers defeat even with $24.5 million verdict
Aug. 28, 2006

A Sangamon County jury in March agreed that Jerry Gaston, an innocent victim of a car crash, deserved compensation for his suffering and money to pay his medical bills.

Consequently, a lawsuit filed by Gaston against Derek Brown and two Springfield police officers who had been following Brown’s car the night of the crash came down to this:

The jury awarded Gaston $24.5 million – the largest verdict in Sangamon County Circuit Court history and enough money to take care of him and his family for the rest of his life.

But in a heart-wrenching twist for Gaston and his fiancee, Minnie Blue-Bond, the jury ruled that Brown alone was responsible for the crash and that only he was liable to pay Gaston the $24.5 million.

Brown had no driver’s license or auto insurance when the accident took place in 2002. He sits in jail, with no income and no assets and – if his driving and criminal records are any indication – few prospects of either in the future.

The city and the two officers were cleared of any liability.

Gaston and Blue-Bond sat in stunned disbelief after the verdict was read.

“I was shocked. I was crushed. I didn’t have any hope left, and I still don’t have any hope left,” Blue-Bond said.

They have never seen a dime of the award. Neither have Orrin Holman and Casey Joy, other crash victims who also were awarded compensation in the suit – $75,000 for Holman and $6,500 for Joy.

Trial arguments and the resulting verdict came down to one primary issue: Were the two Springfield police officers, Chris Stout and April Smiddy, pursuing Brown in violation of police department rules, and did they thereby cause the crash?

Had the jury found they violated the rules, city taxpayers could have been on the hook for millions of dollars.

According to the department’s general orders on vehicle pursuits, officers can initiate pursuits only when they think someone in the fleeing vehicle was involved in a forcible felony.

“Pursuits for traffic offenses, property crimes, whether felony or misdemeanor, or when the suspect flees for unknown reasons are prohibited,” the orders state. “In choosing whether to initiate a pursuit, or to allow its continuation, officers will consider the degree of risk to which the officer exposes himself and others in so doing.”

The officers said in depositions that they had no reason to believe Brown had committed any crime other than running a red light at 15th Street and South Grand Avenue.

Another point of contention was whether and when the officers activated their lights and sirens.

Ultimately, the jury determined that Brown, not the officers, was responsible for his actions and the resulting crash.

The city paid $255,000 to an outside law firm, Brown, Hay and Stephens, to represent it and the officers in the suit. Thomas Schanzle-Haskins of Brown, Hay and Stephens said after the verdict that, while Gaston’s injuries are a tragedy, they were not caused by the officers.

“These are two very fine Springfield Police Department officers who were doing a good job in what they were doing the night of the accident,” he said. “I’m happy to see them vindicated, and I believe the jury’s verdict put 100 percent of the blame where it belonged.”

Bruce Beeman, attorney for Gaston, Holman and Joy, on May 30 filed a notice to appeal the civil case. Oral arguments could take place as early as December.

While the money from the verdict would be a big help to those who were injured, Holman said, the case isn’t about money.

“The moral of that whole story is the police should have let Derek Brown go instead of endangering people,” he said. “Every time they’re on the east side and they see (Gaston), they got to live with that.”

The trial was the first time Casey Joy and Michael Perkins – both of whom also were injured in the crash and sued – had ever seen Gaston. They were shocked by his condition.

“I got really emotional when I saw him,” Perkins said, recalling how Gaston and Blue-Bond sat through every day of the trial and how she tended to his every need in the courtroom.

The proceedings were tough on Joy, too. Each day after court adjourned, he said, he rode the bus to his church on Jackson Street, went inside the silent building and sat alone.

“I was sad – not for me, because I’m all right. I was sad for the man in the wheelchair and to see his face when they said it was 100 percent Derek Brown’s fault,” he said. “If I didn’t get anything, I think they at least should have given that man in the wheelchair something.”

Of all the people who attended parts of the eight-day trial, the two Gaston and Blue-Bond most wanted to hear from disappointed them.

Mayor Tim Davlin cleared his entire schedule and sat in on every day of the trial to show how important the case was to the city.

“I knew in my heart that we were innocent of that, and I felt like they were suing for the wrong reasons,” Davlin said. “If you’re suing for sympathy and suing someone with the deep pockets, we just don’t have it. We do not have that kind of money.

“So I felt like sitting there, it would send a message that they’re not suing a big corporation, they’re suing me, and I take it personally. I thought it was the right thing to do to show I had interest in this case.”

Blue-Bond said the mayor did not speak to her and Gaston, other than to say good morning each day, until after the verdict was read and the high-fives among attorneys in the courtroom were over. She said the mayor reached for Gaston’s hand and said, “I’m sorry it didn’t go the way you wanted it to.”

It wasn’t the apology they’d hoped for.

“It was one of the saddest things. It was everything I could do to keep the tears back when I walked over to him after the trial was over,” Davlin said.

“I couldn’t talk to them during the trial, other than to say ‘hi’ every day. We lived together for a week and a half. You feel terrible because the guy was wronged by a thug. … Unfortunately, the city of Springfield wasn’t the responsible party.”

No one from the police department ever apologized to the couple, either.

“A verbal apology wouldn’t mean anything to me at this point,” Blue-Bond said. “I’m very bitter.”

Brown, the couple said, never uttered a word to them during either the civil trial or during his criminal trial for the crash, not even when they all found themselves riding together in an elevator at the county building.

Brown’s behavior during the trial shocked many of those who witnessed it. He’d served three years in prison for the crash and did not have an attorney represent him in the civil case. He repeatedly defied the judge’s orders to testify in the lawsuit. One such exchange went like this:

Beeman: Did you ever say in your deposition that you knew from the time that you went – the police went through the stoplight …

Brown: Why do we keep going through this, man?

Circuit Judge Patrick Kelley: Just bear with us, Mr. Brown.

Brown: I’m saying I done did three years for this thing. Ain’t nothing else to talk about.

Judge: Well, hopefully, this will put an end to it for you. Answer the question.

Brown: There is nothing to talk about, Your Honor. Nothing.

Judge: There’s a lot to talk about, Mr. Brown. Answer Mr. Beeman’s questions.

Brown: I ain’t going to answer. Then we’re just going to sit here. I got nothing but time. We can sit here.

Gaston said it doesn’t bother him anymore that Brown behaved the way he did at the trial and that he never apologized about the crash. If he had a chance, though, he’d ask Brown where he was trying to go that night.

“If he talked to me, I’d talk to him. But he doesn’t, so I’m not going to say anything,” Gaston said.

Damages awarded to …
Aug. 28, 2006

Jerry Gaston

  • $3,000,000 for pain and suffering
  • $414,287.44 for past medical

- expenses

  • $10,362,863 for present cash value of all future medical expenses
  • $10,362,863 for loss of a normal life
  • $100,000 for disfigurement resulting

- from the injury

  • $233,272 for projected lost earnings

Total: $24,473,285.44

Orrin Holman

  • $63,308.77 for pain and suffering
  • $3,816.23 for past medical expenses
  • $7,815.00 for lost earnings

Total: $74,940

Casey M. Joy

  • $2,443.78 for pain and suffering
  • $2,443.77 for disfigurement resulting

- from injury

  • $1,612.45 for past medical expenses

Total: $6,500

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Daily struggle / Accident destroys more than just Gaston’s life
Aug. 28, 2006
Minnie Blue-Bond’s heart went cold when she got the phone call from doctors in Springfield.

Her fiance, Jerry Gaston, was hanging on to life by a thread after being badly injured in a car crash caused by a man fleeing from police.

Minnie was 700 miles away, visiting family in Mississippi.

“He’s stable, but it’s shaky,” she heard the doctor say. “Touch and go.”

“Do I need to fly?” she asked. He said no, that it wasn’t necessary but that she should hurry.

Minnie told Jerry’s 8-month-pregnant daughter, his brother and his mother what had happened. A caravan of family left at 11 p.m. that Sunday to get to Springfield the next day.

Jerry was in a coma when they arrived. He hadn’t shown much response to doctors and nurses caring for him. That changed when Minnie walked into the room.

“I called his name, and he did open his eyes. The doctors were freaking out,” she recalled. “Jerry just looked at me. He couldn’t do anything else.

“And when his mom walked up to the bed and she touched his forehead and called his name, he opened his eyes again. So the doctor knew he was actually responding to us.”

Jerry was fighting. Minnie looked at him in that hospital room, hooked up to machines and monitors. Surrounding his head was a halo, a medical device used to stabilize the neck vertebrae.

The more details she gleaned from doctors, the more she understood that Jerry was going to be a quadriplegic and that being his partner would take on a whole new meaning.

***

It’s not really surprising that Jerry opened his eyes when Minnie spoke his name. The story of their love goes all the way back to Calhoun, Miss., where they grew up.

They went to grade school together, and Minnie remembers Jerry as being a somewhat naughty kid.

“Oh, I was pretty terrible,” he admitted. “You name it, I would do it, you know?”

They lost track of each other in the 1960s, when schools in the area began integrating. Life went on, and each got married and had children. Minnie divorced twice and eventually moved to Springfield. She worked for the Illinois Department of Public Aid for 15 years. Jerry divorced and remarried.

Although she didn’t realize it right away, her cousin lived next to Jerry in Calhoun. She and Jerry rekindled their friendship as adults during one of her visits to Mississippi about 1996. They talked on the phone, and she would go to Mississippi when she had the chance. After a year of dating, Jerry made a trip to St. Louis to visit his sister.

“He came up to her house, and he called me and said, ‘I’m in St. Louis – do you want to come down and spend the day with us?’ I did, and one thing led to another,” Minnie recalled with a laugh. “He went back home, called me back and said, ‘I’m moving up there.’ He asked me if he could move, and I told him yeah.”

Jerry clearly remembers what attracted him to Minnie.

“The way she was lookin’ and the way she was talkin’,” he said with a grin.

His personality is what caused Minnie to take a second look at him.

“I watched him with his nieces and nephews, and I knew I had kids and stuff. I was already a foster parent and a day-care provider,” she said. “I was basically looking for someone that had the outgoing personality that could mix with children and the parents. And someone that I could feel safe with and have around my children.”

Their brick ranch-style house on Paul Street is bursting with children. Minnie has three adopted children, ages 13, 7 and 6; three foster children, 15, 14 and 12; and an 18-month-old boy who was born to the oldest foster child. The younger kids share a bedroom on the main floor, and the older ones sleep in the basement, where there are two bedrooms and a bathroom.

Minnie also baby-sits for family and friends, and other foster children she’s raised regularly stream in and out of the house to visit her and help take care of Jerry.

Minnie, 50, also has three adult children, all of whom live in Springfield, and Jerry has three adult children in Mississippi.

The couple talked about getting married in June 2002. Jerry never legally divorced from his second wife, who lives in Mississippi and whom he hasn’t been with in 11 years. He hired a lawyer and planned to get a quick divorce while he and Minnie were there visiting family that year. Then they would get married.

But the crash happened, and their lives screeched to a halt. He and his wife have never divorced, and he and Minnie have never married.

***

Yet Minnie remains firmly planted at Jerry’s side.

She has no legal obligation to stay. They barely scrape by financially. She must care for the seven youngsters as well as tend to Jerry. Lifting, bathing, changing, feeding, grooming, medicating – it’s an endless round-the-clock commitment that a weaker woman would have abandoned by now.

“As far as I’m concerned, we’re married, because when we moved in together we kind of took a vow that that was what we were going to do further down the road when we could,” she said. “Now, there’s no way I could marry him because I can’t financially take care of him.”

Minnie vowed early on that she would never put Jerry in a nursing home. She believes he needs his family and that she is the only one who can provide the one-on-one care he deserves. Her son, Carlos, goes to the house every day to help Minnie get Jerry up in the morning and help with some light housekeeping.

Minnie says she couldn’t do it without Carlos’ help.

“I take care of him because I want to, not because I have to,” Minnie said. “I don’t want to see him go to a nursing home because I’ve worked in nursing homes, and I know what they’re like.”

She has her own health problems to contend with: lupus, congestive heart failure, arthritis and back pain. She often is exhausted, and depression sometimes sets in. Some days she can’t bear to get out of bed.

In many ways, she was a victim of the car crash, too.

When she feels overwhelmed, she goes to her basement laundry room where she can listen to gospel music tapes, wash and fold clothes, and pray. She doesn’t go far because, as she says, her life is there in the house with Jerry.

Does leaving ever cross her mind?

“Yeah, it has,” she said quietly. “Especially if I’m here and the kids are here and I’m still pushing to go and do and trying to make a life for him, it gets really complicated. It gets congested a lot.

“Especially when every chance you make, something is falling through. Nothing is actually ever bright for you. You get depressed.”

She copes with the help of God and her family.

“God, that’s my strength,” Minnie said. “Every time I get to a point where I feel like I can’t do this, I can’t make it anymore, he’ll send someone along to help me or send someone along to show me I’m not the only one having burdens.

“Immediately, I’ll recognize what he’s doing, and I’ll go, ‘I’m going to shut up. I’m sorry. I’m going to do better. I’m going to stop complaining.’”

Minnie’s relationship with Jerry has changed, though their love for each other has not.

They sleep in the same bed, discuss child-rearing and family, pray and eat meals together.

“I still love him, and I think he still loves me,” Minnie said, turning to look at Jerry dozing in his wheelchair. “It’s a lot more kind of yak-yak at each other than it used to be. It used to be like that maybe every so often. Now it’s like every other day.

“But we kind of … he goes to his corner or his room, and I’ll go to the other part of the house and do something or play on the computer.”

There are good days. The children bring joy into their lives, and there are family gatherings, occasional trips to Mississippi and a brief summer vacation to Six Flags in St. Louis. Friends regularly drop in and out of the house.

One thought continues to trouble Minnie, though.

“Right now,” she said, “I am his everything. I’m his caretaker. What happens to him when I can no longer do it?”

Boy’s pool stolen from his backyard

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Part of my job as police reporter for the SJ-R is to thumb through media copies of police reports each day, looking for serious and unusual crime. In July 2006 I found a theft report where the stolen item was a backyard swimming pool. I did a little investigating and learned the victim was a 9-year-old boy who’d saved up his money for months to buy that pool for him and his siblings to play in.

The story ran on a Saturday. I checked my work messages from home that morning, hoping that someone in town would want to help Marcus Fearson out by finding him a new pool. There were dozens of messages by day’s end. One man went to the store promptly at 9 a.m. and brought a brand new pool for Marcus and had already dropped it off.

The police, by the way, nabbed the thief three days later.

Nine months of saving thwarted / Thieves steal pool from 9-year-old
July 15, 2006

Nine-year-old Marcus Fearson saved his allowance for months to buy himself something special.

At first he had his eye on a video game system but, after talking it over with his mom, decided a swimming pool would be just the ticket – a little indulgence to help him, his brothers and his cousins wile away steamy summer afternoons.

So on July 3, Marcus and his mother, Tiffany Fearson, went to Kmart and bought a $120 metal-frame pool. It was blue, 12 feet wide and 30 inches deep and came with its own filter pump. Marcus paid for half, and his mother put in the other half, even though she is going through bankruptcy proceedings.

“That poor kid,” Tiffany Fearson said. “he saved a while for that money. He doesn’t get much of an allowance right now.”

Marcus, who has mild autism, and his two brothers, McCory and Mekhi, even got new swim gear to wear in the pool.

Now, the only evidence there ever was a pool at the Fearson home is a vague, 12-foot-wide circular imprint in the back yard. The pool wasn’t there even long enough for the grass to turn brown underneath.

Someone dismantled and stole the pool overnight Wednesday, apparently hauling it out through the privacy fence gate in the alley behind the home, which is in the 1200 block of East Capitol Avenue.

“He knows about saving money and getting what he wants,” Tiffany Fearson said Friday. “I matched him on it, and I feel terrible that it was stolen. He liked to maintain the pool. He used to help us clean it. I thought it was great he was learning some responsibility.”

Marcus said he liked splashing in the pool and misses it.

“It was fun swimming in it,” said Marcus, who will be in the fourth grade at Owen Marsh Elementary School this fall.

Two days before the pool was taken, someone stole the ladder off it. To add insult to injury, the thieves who took the pool didn’t even take all the parts necessary to rebuild it. They left behind one of the T-shaped parts that locks the frame in place.

“You’ve got to be a pretty low life to steal a kid’s pool,” said Marcus’ grandmother, Mary Fearson.

The family has lived in its home for two years.

Last year, the Fearsons’ inflatable pool twice was the victim of thieves and vandals. They got it back the first time, but someone later slashed it, rendering it useless.

That’s why they opted for a metal-frame pool this time, assuming that no one would be able to destroy it or take it.

“When the pool was stolen last year, the kids cried. They didn’t even cry this time, they’ve gotten so used to it,” Tiffany Fearson said. “It would have been a nice thing for them to jump into today, that’s for sure.”

Bullrunners speed by Springfield

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I was at lunch with fellow reporter Sarah Antonacci one afternoon in July 2006, when we started noticing a few cars with numbers on them speeding south on Interstate 55. We saw more of them whizz by and began hearing unusual animated state police chatter on the scanner. Then we realized most of the numbered cars were luxury sports cars.

We pulled over at the Taco Bell on Toronto Road after finding a Lotus parked in the lot. The driver came out of the restaurant and talked to me about what was going on. Turns out it was a cross-country rally for the rich and famous known as “Bullrun.”

Passing through / Rally routes rich and famous down I-55
July 25, 2006

Joe Talbot’s customized metallic blue Lotus looked a little out of place parked in the lot of Taco Bell on Toronto Road Monday afternoon.

After all, there aren’t many Lotuses in these parts. Same goes for Lamborghinis, Porsches and the multitude of other sports cars cruising down Interstate 55 Monday – a few of which reportedly were going faster than 100 mph, sometimes on the shoulders, and had state troopers scrambling to track them down.

Talbot’s was among the dozens of high-end luxury cars that raced through the Springfield area on Monday’s leg of Bullrun 2006, an invitation-only coast-to-coast rally that attracts the rich, the famous and a cast of “petrosexuals” – people obsessed with cars and motor sports.

Entry fees for the race are $14,000.

Among the celebrities reportedly participating in Bullrun this year are racer Mario Andretti, Olympic athlete Carl Lewis, actors Hayden Christensen, Corey Feldman and Corey Haim and possibly former Chicago Bulls forward Dennis Rodman.

Participants left Times Square in New York City on Saturday and expect to arrive in Los Angeles on Saturday. They reportedly stay in five-star hotels, and the event’s parties are “legendary,” according to the event’s Web site at www.bullrun.com.

“Bullrunners” make their way from one checkpoint to the next and don’t know their destinations until they are handed a card each morning when they depart. The card lists an address, a destination city and the number of miles to get there. The rest of the navigation is up to them.

Talbot, a commissioning editor with British television network ITV, stopped at Taco Bell for a quick bite, then hit the highway again. Destination: 1 Busch Plaza in St. Louis, also known as the Anheuser-Busch brewery.

“We try and drive responsibly,” said Talbot, who is from London. “Not that many of us know the speed limits. It varies from state to state. Occasionally, as many people do, we get a bit overexcited at times.”

Most of the participating cars were emblazoned with numbers on their sides and adorned with a variety of decals. Among the makes and models represented in this year’s rally are Lamborghini, Ferrari, Bentley, Mercedes, Corvette, Lotus, Porsche, Ford Mustang, Chrysler PT Cruiser, Range Rover and BMW. A 1954 Studebaker Commander and a 1980s-model Suzuki SUV are among others in the running.

Tom and Rita Naylor of Stratfordshire, England, were driving car No. 48, a Buick Lucerne – not the sexiest car in the rally but certainly a reliable way to get across the country. Tom, a retired truck driver, won $30 million in a lottery in 2001. His personal cars include three Jaguars, a Bentley and an Astin Martin.

“It’s a great deal of fun. It’s not a race, it’s a rally,” he said, as he and Rita stopped to fuel up at a gas station near Illinois 108 outside Carlinville.

Though he hadn’t been driving as fast as the other participants and was consistently coming in last, he did manage to get a ticket for going 80 mph in a 60 mph zone early in the trip. He’s not worried about the fines, though.

“It’s only money at the end of the day,” he said.

Many of the drivers outfitted their cars with such equipment as police scanners, CB radios and radar detectors and jammers. They made sure they had cash, identification, vehicle registration information and proof of their vehicle’s ownership.

Most of the cars had cameras and video equipment to document the race. Videographers were among the group, and some of their footage is going to air on Spike TV, one of them said.

Talbot said there even is a helicopter with special camera equipment following the race from above.

“It’s an eclectic mix of people – fast cars, old cars, slow cars,” Talbot said. He added: “The best part of the rally is that it’s not about the cars. It’s about the people in the cars. There’s a real camaraderie.”

Most of the drivers had been pulled over at least once during the drive, according to Web sites dedicated to tracking the rally. Talbot said he’d been pulled over several times already but said the police had been very nice.

He added that the Illinois leg of the rally was “really boring,” “very flat” and the “worst part” of the race so far. He gave the leg between New York and Toronto a rave review.

District 9 Illinois State Police began receiving complaints about speeding sports cars with numbers on the side about 1:30 p.m. They received reports of cars going as fast as 140 mph. Most, if not all, of the drivers were slowed dramatically when they reached the construction zone at the Lake Springfield bridges south of the city.

By late afternoon, troopers had stopped two of the Bullrunners and issued them citations. District 6 troopers north of District 9 reportedly pulled over six drivers, and District 18 troopers to the south were made aware of the rally heading their direction. At least one of their troopers worked from an overpass, using a Lidar device to catch speeders.

Capt. Tim Reents of District 18 pulled over car No. 66 for going 78 mph in a 65 mph zone near Illinois 108. The same car was pulled over earlier near Springfield for having no visible registration.

“We can’t allow people to have an open race on the interstate highways,” he said.

Police reopen 2002 death case

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Of all the unsolved murders in the area, this is the one I most wish police would solve. I think part of what bothers me about this case is that there doesn’t seem to be anyone fighting on Julia Testa’s behalf, rattle the police department’s cage or pounding the pavement themselves in an effort to find her killer.

No one even ran an obituary in the newspaper for her. I have no idea what she looked like, who her family is or what she did in life.

The case remains unsolved.

Police reopen ’02 death case / Initial investigation into woman’s probable homicide stalled
July 17, 2006

Springfield police have reopened their investigation into the 2002 death of a woman whose remains were found in her bed at a group home on MacArthur Boulevard.

Julia M. Testa, 39, was found Aug. 29, 2002, inside her room at 702 S. MacArthur Blvd. after a mental health worker went to check on her because she had missed several appointments.

While police investigated Testa’s death as a possible homicide after receiving autopsy results, the probe stalled for some reason.

Testa’s autopsy report shows she died of a stab-cutting wound on the front of her neck “and possibly additional blunt-force trauma.” The wound was to her larynx, not the veins or arteries of her neck, a detective testified at the coroner’s inquest Oct. 2, 2002.

However, evidence that typically would point to homicide was not present in Testa’s apartment.

The door to her top-floor apartment was locked from the inside with a double-cylinder deadbolt, and her key was found inside. Her pajama-clad body was in bed in a natural sleeping position with the covers up to her shoulders and a stuffed animal next to her.

Police found no murder weapon inside the third-floor apartment, which was in a group home for mentally ill people. Nothing was out of place inside the apartment, and her purse had not been rifled through. It did not appear that any type of struggle had taken place.

According to a transcript of the coroner’s inquest, Testa suffered from a bipolar condition and had a history of alcohol- and drug-related problems. Her mental health worker told police she had not seen Testa for at least three weeks.

The body was badly decomposed when it was found that summer afternoon, making it difficult to determine a precise time of death. She had no defensive wounds, and there was no sign that she had been sexually assaulted.

Detectives also could not determine a motive for Testa’s death.

“We are unable to determine that she had any problems with anyone, any suicidal tendencies or any problems with the apartment itself,” Sgt. Tim Young, a now-retired detective with the Springfield Police Department, testified at the inquest.

A member of the coroner’s jury asked Young if it was possible that the injury to Testa’s neck happened while she was out somewhere and she came home, went to bed and passed away.

“Yes, that is possible,” Young responded. “That type of injury to the larynx would not be an instantaneous death. There would not be a lot of blood. Usually people that inflict this type of injury do not discard the device that they used. She probably did not do this to herself.”

The coroner’s jury ruled Testa’s death a homicide, but its determinations do not legally require further investigation or criminal charges.

Police who returned to the apartment after the autopsy removed the carpet from Testa’s bedroom and the hallway to have it tested for blood trace evidence after they received the autopsy results. A police spokesman last week would not reveal the results of that testing or otherwise comment on specifics of the case, saying it is a pending investigation.

In January 2003, a police department spokesman responding to questions about why the department did not include Testa’s death in its murder statistics said police believed she died of natural causes.

“We’re currently treating this as a death investigation,” Ralph Caldwell, who now is assistant police chief, was quoted as saying. “We’re waiting for results from lab work and for follow-up investigations. We are not reporting this as a homicide at this time. We’re not hunting for anyone.”

Testa’s death was not included in the Springfield Police Department’s crime statistics at any point since 2002. However, that year’s stats will be amended this year to reflect that the death is being treated as a murder, Williamson said.

It is unclear what caused the apparent pause in the investigation, nor is it known why police recently chose to refocus on the case.

Lt. Doug Williamson, filling in as the department’s spokesman last week, said detectives have been assigned to the case.

“It’s being actively investigated. When officers and detectives went out after the autopsy, there were no signs that there was any foul play. After the autopsy it was determined that there was,” he said, noting that detectives and evidence technicians went to the house as soon as they determined Testa was an apparent murder victim.

“I do know that we are taking all the information that was collected and sent off and are refocusing on the investigation and it is being actively worked. Obviously, new cases that come in have the primary manpower resource.”

Pit bull mauls second grader

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After learning that a Springfield girl had been mauled by a pit bull, SJ-R photographer Justin Fowler and I set out to find the girl and learn more about how the girl was doing and what happened. We found 8-year-old Leticia Starks at her home with her mother. Starks’ ear was visibly injured, and she was visibly out of sorts from the traumatic incident.

‘Traumatized’ / Stitches alone may not heal girl attacked by pit bull
May 11, 2006

Eight-year-old Leticia Starks is a shadow of her usually rambunctious self.

That’s to be expected, her mother said, considering the trauma the second-grader suffered Tuesday night when a pit bull attacked her, mauling both ears, her right arm and her upper back.

“It’s not good. I have to look at my baby and see the pain that she’s in,” said Mondai Myers. “To be honest, I wish it was me who was mauled. I’d trade places with her in a minute. My baby is very traumatized.”

Doctors stitched up the wounds, and Leticia is taking pain medication. She returned home early Wednesday after spending several hours at Memorial Medical Center.

Myers said she’s unsure when Leticia will return to her class at Matheny Elementary School. She’s also unsure if the girl’s badly mauled right ear can be rebuilt, or if the attack damaged her hearing.

What is certain is that her little girl is alive and the pit bull is dead.

No one has stepped forward to claim ownership of the dog, which was shot by a police officer after the attack. It had no collar or tags.

Leticia was playing outside her family’s home in the 2000 block of East Lawrence Avenue about 7 p.m. Tuesday when the light-brown pit bull with white paws and a dark pink nose – Leticia clearly remembers the color of the dog’s nose – wandered into the back yard.

The dog attacked the family’s 4-month-old pit bull, which was chained in the yard. The puppy survived, although one side of its face was swollen from the attack.

The other dog continued to the front yard, where it climbed onto the front porch and jumped at a stroller where Myers’ 6-month-old son was sitting. Leticia and her brothers and sisters were playing in the yard near the street when the pit bull ran up to them.

“I had just walked off the porch to go get something to eat. We got to the stop sign down there, and I got a call on my cell phone and all I could hear was screaming and crying,” Myers said. “I just hung up the phone and ran. I didn’t even ask what was wrong.”

When she got back to the yard, Myers found Leticia bleeding and injured. A neighbor had already phoned 911.

“All she kept saying was, ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I want to go to school,’ ” Myers recalled.

Leticia was taken by ambulance to Memorial. She was able to go home about 2 a.m.

Some cartilage and part of her right ear lobe is gone. It took many stitches to close the wound, as well as the one on her left ear, which was not as badly mangled. She also has stitches in her arm and on her back.

Myers has a medical card but is unsure how much the bills will amount to. She and Leticia are going to see a plastic surgeon next week.

Leticia was quiet Wednesday, presumably from the medication and the trauma of what had happened. She broke into a smile only when her mother and siblings described how she is something of a daredevil and likes to climb to the top of one of the large trees in their yard.

Her 13-year-old sister, Tonie Vance, was watching the children outside at the time of the attack. She said that when she realized what was happening, she started ushering the other children to safety on the porch. She said Leticia didn’t immediately grasp the dangerousness of the situation.

“At first she was laughing because she thought the dog was playing. Then the dog jumped over her head, and then it came back around and grabbed her ear,” Vance said. “She ran, and I tried to hold the dog, but it broke loose.”

The dog went after Leticia once more before running away. Myers said her 12-year-old son and a friend ran after the dog with baseball bats.

Police and animal control officers combed the area looking for the dog, eventually finding it at Wheeler and Capitol avenues, where an officer shot it. The wounded pit bull continued running and stopped in an alley off McCreery Avenue just north of the intersection with Cook Street, where it collapsed and died.

Myers said she learned from animal control Wednesday that the dog did not have rabies.

“I thank God that dog did not have rabies,” she said. “I’m not angry at any person because I don’t know whose dog it was. I’m just angry that it happened to my baby.”

Sgt. Pat Ross, spokesman for the Springfield Police Department, said authorities have been asking residents in the area if they know who owned the dog but have had no success. Myers and her children said they had never seen the dog before.

“We would hope whoever the owner of the dog is would come forward,” Ross said.

Child scalding leads to mother’s arrest

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I was a relatively new mom when this story unfolded, and it had a profound effect on me. My son was almost the same age as the tiny victim in this incident, and I could not imagine ever harming my son’s little body. I remember going to the ladies room and crying in the middle of the reporting process — both out of sympathy for the boy and anger toward the mother.

Child abuse prevention is an issue that became more important to me the more I reported on abuse cases, especially after I had children of my own.

Toddler scalded; mother arrested / Boy allegedly put in hot water after soiling his diaper
April 1, 2006

A Springfield woman was jailed Friday after she allegedly punished her 15-month-old son by scalding him in the bathtub with hot water, causing second- and first-degree burns, police and prosecutors said.

The burns were severe enough that some of the baby’s damaged skin fell off when he was lifted out of the bathtub by a witness, police said.

Brea N. Reese, 20, of the 1700 block of East Clay Street is charged with one count of aggravated battery to a child. Reese also goes by the alias Sherika M. Smith, according to jail officials.

The boy is being treated in the burn unit at Memorial Medical Center for deep second-degree burns on his feet, legs and bottom and first-degree burns on his lower back. Police said the injuries are not believed to be life-threatening, though he is expected to be hospitalized for several days.

Police were sent to St. John’s Hospital shortly after 1 a.m. Friday, after medical personnel notified them that a possibly abused child had been brought in for medical attention. Officers arrived as the child was being transferred by ambulance to Memorial.

A woman who was at the house at the time of the alleged abuse took the baby to the hospital. Police said Reese fled after the incident but showed up at the hospital later in the morning.

Police said the child soiled his diaper, which apparently infuriated Reese, who also is mother to a 3-week-old baby and a 2-year-old child.

Reese allegedly took the baby into the bathroom at her home on Clay Street, shut the door, ran scalding hot water and put the baby in the tub. There were three other adults in the house at the time, two of whom live there. The child’s father apparently was not there at the time.

One of the adults in the house told police she heard Reese slapping the child and went to the bathroom door and pounded on it, demanding to be let in because she could hear the baby screaming.

Reese allegedly walked out of the bathroom and left the house. The woman who pounded on the door went into the bathroom, picked the boy up out of the tub and noticed skin hanging from his legs and bottom. She drove the baby to the hospital for help.

Authorities began searching for Reese, who eventually showed up at St. John’s, where she was arrested and taken to the police department to be interviewed.

Springfield police spokesman Sgt. Pat Ross said there was no indication in any of the police reports that Reese was intoxicated or impaired at the time of the alleged incident.

A physician at the hospital told police that burns of the nature the boy suffered would require water temperatures to be anywhere from 115 to 130 degrees.

Police took custody of Reese’s other children, and the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services was notified.

“Our investigators will be assisting in the investigation with DCFS,” Ross said.

Aggravated battery to a child is a Class X felony punishable by six to 30 years in prison.

Associate Circuit Judge John Mehlick set Reese’s bond at $100,000 and appointed a public defender to represent her.

Assistant state’s attorney Randy Blue asked that bond be set at $250,000, saying that Reese had an argument with her boyfriend before going home and putting her child into the tub. Assistant public defender Bill Conroy asked that bond be set at $50,000.

A preliminary hearing is scheduled for April 20.

A search of Sangamon County Circuit Court records shows that Reese was on probation for shoplifting. She has no other criminal record.
Mother had lost boy before / Evidence of neglect in case of child scalded last month
April 8, 2006
Byline: DEAN OLSEN and JAYETTE BOLINSKI STAFF WRITERS

At least six months before a Springfield toddler allegedly was scalded by his mother, Illinois’ child-welfare agency temporarily took him from her because of suspicions he was being neglected.

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services removed Demetrius Taylor in September after finding credible evidence that his mother, Brea N. Reese, had neglected him, DCFS spokeswoman Kim McMorris said this week.

The now 16-month-old boy, who was burned by hot water last week, remained in foster care until February, when a local judge ordered him returned to his mother, McMorris said.

Reese, 20, was offered and received “supportive services” – including several visits by a caseworker – once Demetrius was back at home, McMorris said.

“There was no indication that anything was wrong in the home,” McMorris said. “At that time, things appeared to be fine.”

Demetrius was released Thursday from Memorial Medical Center. He had been scalded about midnight March 30 in a bathtub at a home in the 1700 block of East Clay Street.

He initially was taken to St. John’s Hospital about 1 a.m. March 31. Hospital officials notified authorities, and Reese was arrested.

She was charged with one count of felony aggravated battery to a child and was being held Friday in the Sangamon County Jail on $100,000 bond. She has been appointed a public defender.

Her son was transferred later March 31 from St. John’s to Memorial’s burn unit, which treated him for deep second-degree burns on his feet, legs and bottom, and first-degree burns on his lower back.

Reese’s two other children – a 3-week-old daughter and a 2-year-old daughter – were temporarily placed with relatives “because of the risk of harm,” McMorris said.

DCFS officials wouldn’t say where Demetrius is now, but Monique Reese – Brea Reese’s mother – said the boy had been placed in the home of his father’s cousin, who also is caring for Brea Reese’s other two children, Demetriona and De’Nasia.

Monique Reese, 37, a landscape worker and divorced Springfield mother of three, said she doesn’t believe the allegations against her daughter. She said the scalding probably was an accident involving a busy, single mother who may have been dealing with postpartum depression.

“My daughter’s not a monster,” Monique Reese said. “My daughter’s a loving mother and very good with her kids. It’s not up to anybody to judge but God.”

Police said the alleged abuse happened when Brea Reese, apparently angry that Demetrius had soiled a diaper, took him into the bathroom, shut the door, ran scalding hot water and put him in the tub.

The baby’s father was not in the home at the time, police said, but three other adults were. One got Demetrius out of the tub and took him to St. John’s after Brea Reese walked out of the house.

Reese, an unwed, unemployed mother who dropped out of Southeast High School her sophomore year, was staying with her children at the home of a friend at the time, said Vernice Miller, 39, of Springfield.

Miller, a nurse’s aide, said the East Clay Street home is owned by Miller’s fiance, Memory Bailey. Reese and her children were living there temporarily with Miller’s 20-year-old daughter and 22-year-old son.

Reese “said she was getting stressed out with three kids,” Miller said.

Reese appeared to be more agitated when she cared for Demetrius, Miller said. But Reese’s mother and Reese’s boyfriend, whose name is also Demetrius Taylor, said that wasn’t the case.

Taylor, 23, who said he is unemployed and the father of all three of Brea Reese’s children, said he doesn’t believe Reese intentionally hurt his son.

“I don’t blame nobody. Mistakes happen,” he said, though he added that he blames himself “a little” for the incident because he wasn’t there to help Reese with child care that night. The couple don’t live together, although they have in the past, he said.

Reese’s mother said she raised her own children without much involvement from their two fathers and doubted that poverty had anything to do with her grandson’s injuries.

But The Children’s Defense Fund, a child-advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., says research indicates that children in poor families are 22 times more likely to be abused or neglected – in part because of the stress that poverty creates.

Children with teen parents – especially poor, unwed parents – face an even higher risk of being abused because of the burdens on those single parents, according to Mark Testa, director of the University of Illinois’ Children and Family Research Center.

“It creates a very difficult situation for the caregiver,” he said. “It results in a multiplier effect.”

More than 93 percent of births to Sangamon County teens in 2003 took place out of wedlock, and about 40 percent of all births to Sangamon residents each year occur out of wedlock, according to the latest statistics available.

DCFS previously removed young Demetrius Taylor in September because he was failing to gain weight, according to his father. The elder Taylor said DCFS officials at the time contended that he and Reese weren’t capable of caring for the boy.

DCFS officials wouldn’t discuss the details of why they removed the boy last year.

Demetrius’ father noted that his son had to undergo treatment in St. Louis and Springfield when he was born with intestines outside his body – a condition successfully treated with surgery.

Monique Reese, said she has visited her daughter in jail, where she is being kept under constant supervision in an area reserved for prisoners at risk of harming themselves or committing suicide.

“She’s crying a lot and worried about her kids,” Monique Reese said. “She’s taking it hard. We’re all taking it hard.”

‘A dark cloud’ over police

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Fellow SJ-R reporter Sarah Antonacci and I worked together on this piece about problems within the Springfield Police Department’s Major Case Unit and more specifically with former detectives Paul Carpenter and Jim Graham, whose methods had been called into question by local attorneys, a judge and a fellow detective.

This award-winning piece brought together all the issues with Major Case and helped readers understand what was at stake.

Detectives said to be loose with procedures / Allegations against Major Case Unit detail numerous investigation violations
Jan. 22, 2006

Allegations against the Springfield Police Department’s now-disbanded Major Case Unit apparently revolve around suspicions that unit detectives violated department procedures and legal requirements in connection with search warrants, suspect interviews and court testimony.

In one case, a panel of federal appellate judges said they believed detectives had not told the truth when testifying against an alleged drug dealer. Their actions, the judges said in a written opinion, cast “a dark cloud” over the conduct of all police officers.

Illinois State Police investigators for months have been looking into allegations against the unit, as well as reviewing some of its investigations and the unit’s policies.

The state police probe originally was expected to lead to, if anything, internal departmental discipline of any officers found to have acted improperly. However, sources inside and outside the Springfield Police Department now say the investigation could culminate in criminal charges against some city officers.

The Major Case Unit was disbanded as of Jan. 1 by Police Chief Don Kliment. Kliment said the move was meant to relieve overworked detectives and had nothing to do with the investigation.

Two detectives formerly with the unit, Paul Carpenter and Jim Graham, have been placed on administrative leave while the investigation continues. They have not been formally accused of any wrongdoing, and city officers have said that being put on administrative leave is not necessarily an indication of guilt. Carpenter declined to comment on this story without authorization from the police department, which was denied. Graham could not be reached.

According to documents obtained by The State Journal-Register, a local judge, a Springfield attorney, a private investigator and a former drug investigator, in addition to the federal appellate court opinion, have called into question the unit’s investigative techniques and the integrity of some of its detectives.

Many of the problems apparently have to do with procedures used for obtaining search warrants. Several defense attorneys said privately they are taking additional measures to make sure cases against people they’re representing were built legitimately.

In some instances, cases have been thrown out against apparently guilty people because of allegedly improper behavior by detectives. In others, including the trial of a man for a 1994 murder, detectives have been accused of going too far to attempt to convict people who may have been innocent of the crimes they were suspected of.

Many of the allegations stem from incidents that preceded Mayor Tim Davlin’s appointment of Kliment as police chief in June 2003. Kliment said he asked for the state police investigation after learning of the allegations.

“The matter’s still under investigation by the Illinois State Police,” Kliment said Saturday night. We asked for their assistance, and we’re not going to have a comment until the investigation is concluded.”

Ernie Slottag, Davlin’s spokesman, said the mayor is aware of the investigation.

“The state police are looking into this, and we’re looking forward to seeing what their findings are,” he said. “I don’t know what the allegations are. It’s really an internal issue, a personnel issue. The thinking was the state police could be more objective at looking into this, and we welcome their findings.”

***

Former associate judge Stuart Shiffman apparently was one of the first to document concerns about city detectives. After reading a newspaper article in February 2001 about the dismissal of drug charges against two men because of problems with an affidavit for a search warrant, Shiffman wrote a memo to Chief Judge Leo Zappa and all other Sangamon County judges.

The case involved Phillip C. Thomas, whose truck containing 20 pounds of marijuana was stopped and searched by detectives in September 1999. Thomas was sentenced to eight months in prison and served about four months at the Vienna Correctional Center before his conviction was nullified, and he was released.

Officials at the time said a detective failed to follow proper procedures in identifying a confidential source in an affidavit for a search warrant. Charges against a second man arrested in the same investigation also were dropped.

Bill Pittman, who commanded the Springfield Police Department’s investigations division at the time, said then that city internal affairs investigators were looking into the incident. The department was reviewing other cases to make sure similar problems hadn’t happened before, Pittman said.

In his memo, Shiffman said he had learned that, on at least two other occasions, cases investigated by two Major Case Unit detectives were dismissed when information they provided later proved to be false.

“What may be at issue here is the integrity of an important judicial function, the review and issuance of search warrants,” Shiffman wrote. “I believe that the entire judiciary of this County is entitled to be certain that this process is not tainted by false and misleading statements by police officers.”

Shiffman retired from the local bench last week.

On Friday, Shiffman said he met in 2001 with then-Chief John Harris, Pittman and circuit judges Leo Zappa and Patrick Kelley. He characterized the meeting as a “dog and pony show” and said he felt the punishment for the officers should be more than internal.

“I expressed concern and felt it needed to be addressed otherwise, not necessarily that they be held accountable criminally. But I don’t think an officer who furnishes false information in an affidavit and someone goes to prison even for five minutes, I don’t think the officer should be working any longer. Apparently Harris and the others didn’t have the same concern,” he said.

Not long after that meeting, Shiffman said, he was excluded from most criminal cases.

“Their response, in a way, was to lock me out of the system. I didn’t handle many criminal cases after that. I would do a search warrant on occasion when it was my rotation. They felt there were plenty of other judges who would sign a warrant.

“I noticed a marked change from then on. It was easier to cut me out of the system rather than do something with the officer.”

***

In April 2005, Springfield attorney Bruce Locher filed an internal affairs complaint against Carpenter, Graham and another major case detective, Stephen Welsh, accusing them of misconduct while investigating three 1999 drug cases involving his clients.

In each of the cases, Locher said, revelations of the questionable information led to charges being dropped and a conviction being overturned.

One case involved Huey Whitley, who was arrested in 1999 after police raided his Springfield hotel room during a drug investigation. Locher did not represent Whitley, but did represent Marcellus Mitchum, who also was arrested during the raid.

Mitchum’s case was dismissed after the court found inconsistencies with police officers’ testimony. Whitley was convicted in federal court, but appealed after Mitchum’s case was thrown out. Whitley’s conviction eventually was overturned.

The situation began when a woman was pulled over after leaving the Stevenson Inn, 2860 Stevenson Drive, and was found with baggies of marijuana in her vehicle. The woman told police she did not get the marijuana from Mitchum or Whitley at the hotel and that she had it with her before she went to the hotel, according to the opinion.

However, an affidavit used to obtain warrants to carry out the raid said Carpenter had told Welsh that the woman got the marijuana at the hotel room. Welsh, under questioning during a suppression hearing, contradicted the information set forth in his warrant affidavit, saying he did not recall who gave him that information, according to the appellate court’s decision.

“None of the officers involved admitted to a clear recollection of who told what to whom,” the appellate opinion states. Welsh, the panel said, gave “less than truthful testimony concerning aspects of his participation in the searches at issue.”

No phone listing could be found for Welsh.

Another question centered on whether police legally searched a motel room. Officers obtained a warrant for one room, but when they carried out the warrant, they learned Whitley and Mitchum were in two rooms. They did not have a search warrant for Mitchum’s room.

According to the opinion, Welsh and another detective testified during Mitchum’s case that they knocked on Mitchum’s door and he let them in. Mitchum denied that, the appellate opinion said – he claimed that he was sleeping when the officers arrived, and they entered without his permission.

It later was revealed that hotel management copied the room’s key card for police and that the computerized timing system in the door showed that a key card had been inserted into Mitchum’s door at the time the search took place.

In its written opinion, a three-judge panel from the Seventh Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago harshly criticized the investigators’ conduct.

“Regrettably, conduct of this type by one or two officers casts a dark cloud over the thousands of dedicated law enforcement personnel working at the local state and federal levels to protect and safeguard the rights of all citizens guaranteed in the United States Constitution,” said the opinion, written by Judge John Coffey. “We refuse to excuse and accept questionable conduct of this nature.”

***

Also in question is the Major Case Unit’s use of what police call “trash rip” operations, in which detectives search a suspect’s garbage once it’s discarded or put out for pickup. No warrant is needed for a “trash rip,” as long as officers follow legal standards for what is considered discarded.

However, drug charges against Reco L. Faine, who also was represented by Locher, were dismissed in 1999 when prosecutors learned a search warrant was obtained under questionable circumstances.

Testimony indicated Graham, Carpenter and Welsh had gone through garbage cans they said Faine put out for pickup and found evidence connecting him to drug possession. That information allowed the officers to obtain a search warrant for Faine’s home, where they allegedly found cocaine inside.

The problem, Locher said, was that Faine did not put his trash out at the curb – he had an arrangement with a trash hauler under which Faine would carry his trash out only when the hauler arrived at his house each week.

Faine was indicted on federal drug charges, but the charges were dropped once assistant U.S. attorney David Risley learned about Faine’s garbage pickup arrangement, Locher said.

The third case cited in Locher’s internal affairs complaint involved another allegation of detectives obtaining a search warrant with suspect information garnered during a traffic stop. The charges were dropped, and the arrest was expunged from his client’s record.

Locher wrote then-Mayor Karen Hasara in May 2001, urging her office to investigate. He said he never received a reply. Locher said he has not heard anything further about the internal affairs complaint he filed in April, but said he believes “it’s about time” for the state police probe.

“I brought these actions to the attention of the city several years ago,” he said. “That Seventh Circuit decision really, I think, speaks to the problems in the Springfield city police department.”

***

Private investigator Bill Clutter filed a complaint against Carpenter and Graham in the Tonia Smith murder investigation.

Smith was killed on New Year’s Day 1994. In 2002, authorities used DNA evidence to link Anthony Grimm to the crime. A jury acquitted Grimm last year.

Clutter accused the detectives of withholding interview reports that may have helped the defense and intimidating a witness.

According to Clutter’s complaint, Graham had a file folder on his lap when he was asked during the trial if he had interviewed a witness, Curtis Bradford. Grimm had said Bradford could support his alibi for the night of the murder.

Graham told defense attorney Craig Reiser he had interviewed Bradford, but that he didn’t have a report indicating he had done so. Graham was asked what was in the folder. Graham allegedly replied that it was his “personal” folder.

Zappa, who was presiding over Grimm’s trial, asked that the file be opened. Inside was a written report Graham had prepared of his Aug. 20, 2002, interview with Bradford.

Failing to disclose reports to the defense violates Illinois law and U.S. Supreme Court rules.

Zappa agreed with prosecutors that police had not willfully concealed the reports, but he said at the time that law enforcement agencies need to come up with better safeguards to prevent evidence from slipping through the cracks.

Clutter also said that a man, age 14 at the time of the killing, who said that he believed he might have seen Smith abducted the night she was murdered ended up being hauled in by city police, even though he was a defense witness.

Clutter said in the complaint that the man, who testified reluctantly, was confronted by Graham and Carpenter and told that the detectives had told the men the witness named as Smith’s abductors what the witness had said and that those men would be in the courtroom when he testified.

***

An additional case investigators may be looking at involves a man with a history of church burglaries whom detectives wanted to talk to during their investigation of the beating of the Rev. Eugene Costa in Douglas Park in December 2004.

The man, Thomas Munoz of Divernon, filed suit in federal court, accusing Graham of violating his civil rights by having him arrested for allegedly trying to burglarize the St. Jude Parish rectory in Rochester. Munoz is representing himself in the case, which is still pending.

Springfield police arrested Munoz to question him about an alleged Dec. 18 break-in attempt at the Rochester church. Detectives also wanted to know if Munoz knew anything about the Costa beating.

Investigators determined Munoz had no connection to the attack on Costa, but they did file the attempted burglary charge, which put Munoz in violation of his parole on a previous church burglary conviction. He was returned to state prison, but was released when the attempted burglary charge was dismissed in March.

Two youths – neither of whom had any connection to Munoz – later admitted beating Costa.

Munoz claims in his suit that the warrant for his arrest was issued as a result of false testimony by Graham that Munoz had tried to enter the rectory “when no such incident even occurred at that location.”

A Rochester police report attached to Munoz’s suit indicates a member of the congregation saw Munoz try to open the front door to the parish reception hall, then try to open the front door to the rectory. When he was unable to open either door, he walked to the side of the residence and tried to open a side door.

The parishioner asked if he could help, and Munoz said he was looking for the Rev. William Carpenter to give him a Christmas decoration. He retrieved the decoration from his vehicle, gave it to the parishioner and left.

The parishioner, an employee of the state Department of Corrections, “felt that Munoz’s mannerisms were suspicious and consistent with someone who was not being truthful,” according to the police report.

***

On Jan. 3, Ron Vose, a veteran Springfield police officer and drug investigator, submitted his resignation, citing fear of retaliation for blowing the whistle on what he described as misconduct by other officers. Vose’s last day on the job was Thursday. He has retained Springfield attorney Howard Feldman, presumably to file a lawsuit against the city, though his resignation letter included no explicit threat of legal action.

Vose’s concerns also center on the Major Case Unit. He said in his letter of resignation that he had complained to his supervisors as early as June 2004. According to the letter, he informed superiors, including Kliment, of potential police misconduct, though the letter does not specify what his concerns were.

He wrote that he believes his superiors told the officers in question about his concerns, causing “a very hostile work environment and led to an altercation between one of the officers and me during November 2004.”

Vose and his attorney drafted a 20-page memo, alleging both administrative and criminal violations, and submitted it to Kliment on March 2, 2005. He later met with Davlin to make sure the mayor was aware of the situation, Vose wrote in his letter. Several days later, he said, found empty boxes with his name on them outside his office door.

Not long after that, Vose was transferred from supervising the department’s drug unit to second-shift street patrol, a move he believes was meant to teach him a lesson for trying to expose misconduct.

Human cargo

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Interstate 55 is a pipeline for many things, including smuggled illegal immigrants.

In monitoring jail booking sheets and federal court filings in 2005, I began to realize state troopers conducting traffic stops along the interstate near Springfield were finding a startling number of illegal aliens traveling in appalling conditions. Affidavits accompanying the federal charges told the stories.

humancargo

Human cargo / Smugglers use I-55 as pipeline to Chicago for illegal immigrants
Nov. 13, 2005

Picture this.

A Chevrolet Suburban hits the highway with 17 people piled inside. Most of the seats have been removed to allow more people to be crammed in.

No one is wearing seat belts, and the passengers – mostly Mexican citizens – are forced to squat below window level so no other motorists can see them.

The driver refuses to stop for bathroom breaks, so passengers must urinate in milk jugs or plastic windshield-fluid containers. If their bodily needs are any worse than that, they’re out of luck.

There might be one stop for food during the 1,800-mile smuggling trip, depending on the driver’s mood. He will remain at the wheel from Phoenix to the passengers’ destinations without napping. If he finally gets sleepy enough, he might ask another passenger to drive for a while. Neither has a valid driver’s license, nor does either have much of a grasp of the English language.

Think it’s a scene from the American Southwest? Think again. Illegal aliens are being smuggled through central Illinois every day, and the overloaded vehicles they’re riding in are a potential threat to motorists’ safety, officials say.

Interstate 55 is a popular route for transporting undocumented Mexican and Central American citizens from “load houses” in Phoenix to Chicago and various other destinations in the eastern United States.

During routine traffic stops in Sangamon, Logan, Macoupin and Montgomery counties between January 2004 and October 2005, Illinois State Police and immigration officials encountered more than 330 illegal aliens, according to numbers from the federal courts and officials with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“As far as I’m concerned, all the cases are mind-boggling. Human beings being treated as cargo is just beyond me or anybody else,” said Greg Archambeault, resident agent in charge of the Springfield ICE office.

“It’s so degrading to these people. I know they’re paying a smuggler to bring them up to the United States, but I don’t think they know what they’re getting into when they get into the back of a van with 16 other people, and they’re not allowed to stop to use the restroom or get food.”

Human smuggling organizations rake in $10 billion in profits every year, according to ICE estimates.

“The people that are being smuggled really are treated like commodities,” said Gail Montenegro, spokeswoman for the Chicago ICE office. “It’s just a business to the smugglers. They really don’t care about human safety at all.”

Federal court filings show that drivers caught locally smuggling aliens, an aggravated felony, have been sentenced to an average of 13 months in prison followed by two to three years of supervised release. After they serve their time, they typically are deported.

The victims are not charged with a crime. They usually are sent to a local jail until they can be sent back home.

In each of the recent documented smuggling cases, the passengers or their families paid a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars to be driven to various destinations, mostly Chicago. Some, however, were going as far as North Carolina, Washington, D.C., and New York. The passengers often are expected to pay additional money once they reach their destinations.

The drivers usually are part of larger organizations that smuggle people through Mexico, over the border and into Arizona or California. Nearly every illegal passenger that’s been stopped during the past two years met up with the drivers at various load houses – usually a house, apartment or motel – in Phoenix.

Discovering a vehicle jammed full of hungry, frightened illegal aliens is nothing new for District 9 Illinois State Police. Master Sgt. Marke Bobbitt, a trooper for more than 20 years, has encountered smuggling vehicles on numerous occasions. The illegals usually are “very pleasant and very passive” despite the conditions, he said.

“When you stop them, any way imaginable of seeing people in the vehicle, you’ll see it. They’ll be squatting, lying down, underneath people’s feet. Usually the vehicles are way overloaded. That’s why when they’re in an accident, there are so many injuries, because there are so many people in there,” he said.

“We’ve seen women who’ve defecated in their pants, and it’s stained through because they won’t stop and let them out. You really feel bad for these people, because they want to get to the place where they have an opportunity to get the American dream, but to get there they’re having to endure these types of things … ”

Among the recent traffic stops that thwarted smuggling trips:

* Sept. 22. A trooper stopped a Ford van with Arizona plates near Lincoln for improper lane usage. Inside were 17 illegals.

The driver’s area was separated from the cargo area by a steel mesh divider, and a bench seat had been placed loosely at the rear of the cargo area. On the dashboard was a list with the passengers’ names, the amounts of money they owed, their destinations and points of contact to collect fees owed. The list indicated a woman already had been delivered to St. Louis and that passenger had owed $700.

Documents in the van indicated it had been driven approximately 65,000 miles during the previous 10 weeks. The passengers told authorities they had paid various smugglers in Phoenix, and several were going to pay additional money after arriving in Chicago, Texas, Alabama, Florida, Indiana and Maryland. The driver had a counterfeit Social Security card and a fake Mexican driver’s license. He was to be paid $1,000 upon returning to Phoenix after delivering all the passengers.

* June 22. A trooper came upon a Dodge Caravan with Wisconsin plates that had broken down along southbound Sixth Street near the Interstate 72 on-ramp. Inside were 11 illegals. The driver told authorities he had made arrangements with a smuggler in Arizona to drive the 10 passengers to New York City. The smuggler gave him a fake Mexican driver’s license and $500 for gasoline and food, the man said.

The passengers told authorities they paid smuggling fees ranging from $1,000 to $9,000 to be taken from Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala and Ecuador through Mexico, across the border and to various U.S. destinations.

* May 19. A trooper stopped a pickup truck for going 70 mph on I-55 near Litchfield. Inside were 16 illegals. They said they had paid smugglers in Phoenix between $1,600 and $2,000 to be taken across the border and driven to Chicago and other locations. They said the driver stopped for food three times and only once for a bathroom break at a rest area. He told them to go to the restroom in pairs so they would not stand out. During the rest of the trip, he instructed them to use a jug, which originally contained window-washing fluid, as a urinal.

* March 15. A trooper stopped a minivan on I-55 near Williamsville for improper lane usage. Inside were 14 illegals. The two drivers told authorities they were going from Atlanta to North Carolina. However, the passengers said they were picked up at a load house in Phoenix. They said they paid varying amounts to smugglers in Phoenix and were going to pay additional money after finding work in Chicago.

* March 18. A trooper stopped a Chevrolet Suburban for improper lane usage and a defective windshield on I-55 at Toronto Road. Inside were 17 illegals seated on the floor and in the rear cargo area, and there were plastic jugs of urine inside. The passengers said the men were not allowed to get out of the van to use the bathroom during the 33-hour trip. The women were allowed to stop only once.

One driver told police he paid smugglers $2,200 to be transported from the border to Chicago via Phoenix, and that the smuggler provided the truck and a cell phone so he could make arrangements to have it picked up after getting to Chicago. The other driver said he crossed the border with four friends and they got lost in the desert for three days, where they met a group of 10. That group’s guide offered to smuggle him to Chicago for $1,000.

The passengers said they crossed the border together and paid various amounts of money to smugglers in Phoenix, and were going to pay more to the drivers when they got to their destinations. They were guided across the border by smugglers and taken to a load house in Phoenix.

Archambeault said there is no end in sight in terms of the number of smuggling loads coming through central Illinois. Illegal aliens are treated as a commodity who will go back to the same smuggling organization and pay more money to be taken across the border again, he said.

Bobbitt agreed.

“I think people would probably be very surprised if they knew the numbers of people we’re stopping. If I wanted to, I could stop illegals every night,” he said.

“In this day and age, you do not know who you’re encountering out there. Is it something where they’re looking for a better life and more opportunities? Or is it someone intending to do harm to the country? It’s an important issue, and it’s something Congress and the president will have to work out as far as what the policy will be.”

The Century Club – 100 mph drivers explain why they do it

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This was one of my favorite research projects at the newspaper.

Robert Pope, a former managing editor at The State Journal-Register, read an article someplace about people who drive faster than 100 mph. He wanted to find out if there were locals who’d done it and ask them why.

The trick was finding them. I looked through circuit court records, but speeding tickets aren’t documented according to speed. One day I was on a ride-alone with a traffic deputy for the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office, and the subject came up. He explained to me under what traffic law a 100-mph ticket would be issued (speeding 40+ mph over the limit). Now I had a starting point.

The folks at the Sangamon County circuit clerk’s office were kind enough to give me a workspace in their office, and I started combing through the ticket files. I made notes on a yellow legal pad as I went along. Voila! I had a story.

From there I tracked down locals who’d been ticketed for driving more than 100 mph, and the result was a unique story about the so-called “Century Club.”

Century club / Since 2003, 124 motorists in Sangamon County have been ticketed for driving more than 100 mph
Aug. 1, 2005

Jason Shephard doesn’t have a pilot’s license. But, man, can he fly.

Shephard, 21, drives a silver 1997 Chevrolet Corvette he’s had since April 2004.

He didn’t really set out to buy a Corvette, a car some associate with “old guys,” but the price was right, so he took it home. To curb those “old guy” assumptions, he got personalized plates that say “NOTDADZ.”

The kid’s got a sense of humor.

The Illinois State Police trooper who clocked him going 128 miles per hour on Interstate 55 just south of Springfield last fall had a sense of humor, too, later telling Shephard he should have asked to see his pilot’s license.

“When he stopped me, he said, ‘Do you know how fast you were going?’ I was hoping he got me after I slowed down, so I said, ‘Probably 90?’ He just laughed and said, ‘Try 128,’” Shephard recalled. “He could have arrested me right there. I really thought I was going to jail that night.”

Shephard, who was too embarrassed to mention the ticket to his friends and family at the time, is a reluctant member of what some call the “century club,” drivers who are cited for going faster than 100 mph.

Between 2003 and the beginning of July this year, 124 motorists were ticketed in Sangamon County for going 100 mph or faster, according to a review of tickets filed with the county circuit clerk. The clerk’s office, in all, processed 133,573 traffic tickets during that time.

Neither the circuit clerk nor local police agencies track how many drivers are cited for going 100 mph or faster. Speeding tickets entered in the court computer system indicate the increments of speed over the posted limit – driving 1 to 10 mph over the limit, 11 to 14 over, 15 to 20 over and so on. Drivers ticketed for going 100 mph or faster fall into the categories of either 31-plus or 40-plus over the limit, depending on where they were caught.

Among the review’s findings:

* Of the 124 “century club” tickets, 34 were written for driving 100 mph, nine were for 101 mph and 19 were for 102 mph. The rest were for driving 103 mph or faster, of which seven were issued to drivers speeding 110 mph or faster.

* Seventy-four percent of the drivers were men.

* The tickets show that 79 percent of those cited did not live in the area. Many were from Chicago, St. Louis or out of state.

* The average age of the 100 mph-plus motorist was about 26. The oldest driver cited was a 62-year-old Chicago woman in a maroon Lincoln who was ticketed for going 100 mph after she passed a state trooper on I-55 north of Sherman at 7:30 a.m. The youngest was a 14-year-old Chatham girl stopped by a Chatham officer for going 100 mph on Illinois 4 at the Interstate 72 overpass at 3:15 a.m.

* The majority of the stops, 91 percent, took place on interstates 55 or 72. Of those, 24 percent were between I-55 mile markers 104 and 110. The Sherman exit is at mile marker 105, and the Williamsville exit is at 109. The interstate becomes three lanes just north of Sherman.

* Thirteen percent were between I-55 mile markers 87 and 93. An exit for East Lake Shore Drive is at mile marker 88, and the South Sixth Street exit is at mile marker 92. And 10 percent of the stops were on I-72 between mile markers 107 and 115. An exit for Riverton is at mile marker 108 and one for Buffalo-Mechanicsburg is at 114.

* Predictably, state troopers made most of the traffic stops, 100 of them to be exact. The Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office made 17. The rest were made by officers from Chatham, Divernon, Illiopolis, Southern View, Jerome and the Secretary of State Police.

* The stops took place all times of the day. Forty-five were during what is considered a typical police agency’s third shift, between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m.; 42 were between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m.; and 35 were between 3 and 11 p.m. The times of two of the stops could not be determined.

* The average vehicle age was a 1999 model. Colors varied: 20 black, 19 white, 18 silver, 15 red, 10 blue, 10 maroon, nine green and seven gray. The rest were other colors.

* Tickets indicate vehicle manufacturers but not necessarily the models. Of those that were stopped, 16 were Chevrolets and 15 were Fords. Most other makes were represented, as well as one Maserati and at least two motorcycles.

Shephard, of Springfield, ended up at the top of the list in terms of speed. At 128 mph, he was driving the fastest when stopped, followed by motorists going 124, 121, 118 and three who were stopped for going 110 mph. The rest were between 108 and 100 mph.

“I never drive like that going through town or when other people are around because you never know what people are going to do. I just happened to be messing around that night and a cop was there,” Shephard said.

He recalled it was an unusually nice November night. Ordinarily, he puts his Corvette away for the winter, but he decided to drive it that night because the weather was so pleasant.

Nobody was on the interstate between Toronto Road and Sixth Street, and he thought maybe he could get home a little faster. By the time he saw the trooper parked in the median, it was too late. He hit the brakes and pulled over as soon as he saw the cop pull out.

A judge eventually fined him $500.

“I definitely don’t speed around town anymore,” he said, explaining that he sometimes drag races the Corvette at Gateway International Raceway near St. Louis to quench his need for speed.

James McKinney, 16, found himself grounded, car-less and face to face with a judge this spring after he was caught driving 108 mph on I-55.

McKinney drives a black 1993 Chevrolet Caprice Classic with a plush burgundy interior and a fancy custom wood steering wheel.

Early March 27, he and two friends decided to drive out to a teen hangout on Toronto Road to see what was going on. They didn’t stay long before turning around to get back on the interstate to return to town.

Three teenagers. Springtime. The open road. A sweet car with a V-8 engine. It wasn’t long before McKinney was cruising well over the 65 mph speed limit. A Sangamon County deputy clocked him on the radar doing 108 and pulled him over.

“I’ve slowed down since then,” McKinney said, recalling that the deputy didn’t say anything to him when he walked up to the car – just looked at him and shook his head.

“After he gave me the ticket, he was cool and started talking about my car,” he said. “That car rides so smooth on the interstate, you don’t even know you’re going that fast.”

His mother wasn’t quite as cool about the situation, he admitted. She grounded him for two weeks, took his car keys away and drove the Caprice herself; McKinney can’t stand other people driving his car.

His initial fine was $1,000, he said. The judge ordered him to read “Then Darkness Fled: The Liberating Wisdom of Booker T. Washington” and pay $150 instead. McKinney said he read the book but couldn’t pay the fine, so the judge gave him 30 hours of community service and two years’ probation.

District 9 state police trooper Vince Fisher, who also is a safety education officer, said driving more than 40 mph over the speed limit is a Class A misdemeanor, meaning that, depending on the circumstances, an officer can arrest drivers going that fast and take them to jail.

Fisher has seen pictures of cars that wrecked going 100 mph.

“They’re not even hardly recognizable as cars. It just looks like somebody took it and smashed it up into a little ball,” he said. “Usually the cars come apart and everything else does, too, including the people inside the car. Your chances of survival are real slim because you’ve got such dynamics involved. It creates thousands and thousands of pounds of force.”

Homeless man dies in tragic fire

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eddiehanson2

In 2005 I wrote about Eddie Hanson, a local homeless man who died in a fire. He and another homeless man were inside a vacant house on the city’s north end looking for food. Eddie lit a fire so they could see. The fire got out of control, and Eddie was overcome and died. The other man escaped.

Authorities seek fire victim’s family / Identified as 41-year-old homeless man
June 9, 2005

Authorities need help finding the family of a homeless man who died Tuesday night when fire tore through the abandoned house in which he’d been squatting.

People who knew him said Edward R. Hanson, 41, worked day- labor jobs but did not talk about his family, according to Sangamon County Coroner Susan Boone.

Officials have determined that he was born in Hawaii and are contacting people in that state with the same last name.

One Web-based people finder shows 126 people in Hawaii with the last name of Hanson, while another shows more than 200.

“It’s only right and proper (that we try to find his family),” Boone said following Wednesday morning’s autopsy, which showed Hanson died of smoke inhalation and burns.

“We are going to pursue as much as we can. It’s almost like looking for a needle in a haystack with that many people by that name in Hawaii. Where do you start? We’re going to try, and anybody here who knows anything about his family, it would be helpful.”

Hanson’s body was found in a bedroom of an abandoned house at 1826 N. 11th St. after it caught fire about 9:45 p.m. Tuesday. The cause and origin of the fire was still being investigated Wednesday afternoon, according to Bob Reside, spokesman for the Springfield Fire Department.

Hanson had no driver’s license or other form of ID on him. Authorities obtained a tentative identification and were able to combine that with his fingerprints to confirm his identity. They took photographs of him to homeless shelters Wednesday morning trying to get information about his background and possible next of kin.

“Every lead we’ve had indicated that he had family, but he didn’t want to talk about his family,” Boone said. “People who did know him and the places where he worked, people did not know of his family. But we were told that he actually was a … good worker and a nice person.”

Dispatchers began getting phone calls about 9:50 p.m. Tuesday reporting the fire. When firefighters arrived, they found the house ablaze with flames showing from all the windows and openings in the building.

The house is tucked away on a short dead-end section of 11th Street. It has a large front setback, while all the neighboring homes sit closer to the street. The front yard is overgrown, and fencing surrounds the property. A railroad track runs behind the home.

Firefighters found the interior walls were brick covered with plaster, indicating it might have been a particularly old house, Reside said.

According to neighbors, the elderly man who formerly lived in the house had health problems and entered a nursing home earlier this year. Most of his belongings, including clothing, were still in the house.

It is unclear why family or friends of the previous resident had not cleaned out the house or taken care of it. Brent Lucas, who has lived next door for more than four years, said he complained to the city health department about two weeks ago after noticing animals, such as opossums, mice and cats, coming and going through a window of the abandoned house.

He also saw two homeless men enter the house Sunday and told them they shouldn’t be staying there. He said he believes a bank took ownership of the house at some point.

“I was going to call them (the health department) again, and then this happened,” Lucas said. “This could have all been avoided.”

City records indicate building officials inspected the house March 15, and notices prohibiting occupancy were posted.

Firefighters got the fire under control within about 20 minutes Tuesday night.

Firefighters found Hanson’s body when they went back inside to check the structure.

Utilities had been turned off, so investigators do not believe gas or electricity was to blame for the fire.

Hanson’s body was not found in the room where the fire apparently began, Reside said, but he declined to elaborate.

“We’re still looking into what caused it. Obviously, it’s suspicious in nature, but was it accidental or on purpose, we don’t know,” he said.

Hanson had several run-ins with law enforcement, according to Sangamon County court records. He had been arrested at least 14 times for trespassing.

In 1997, he was found unconscious, bloody and badly beaten inside his motel room at the Bel-Aire Motel, 2636 S. Sixth St. He was rushed to Memorial Medical Center with what was considered a life-threatening head wound. Police never revealed a motive for the attack.

In June 2004, The State Journal-Register reported that police had sprayed Hanson with pepper spray after he became belligerent toward officers investigating a report of a suspicious person in an alley in the 1300 block of South Eighth Street. Police found three homeless men drinking in the alley. Hanson allegedly walked up and began yelling obscenities at the officers and then refused to comply with their commands.

Friends of homeless man lost to fire say he wouldn’t accept help
 June 10, 2005

Eddie Hanson wouldn’t accept help from anyone and rarely spoke about his childhood or family, those who knew him said Thursday.

And while no one disputes he had a bad addiction to alcohol, they are quick to say he was a nice person who once put the only money to his name – the two pennies he had in a pocket – in a church collection plate.

Hanson, 41, died Tuesday night when fire tore through the abandoned house he had been staying in at 1826 N. 11th St.

Springfield Fire Department spokesman Bob Reside said in a statement Thursday evening that investigators have made a preliminary determination of the cause of the fire. Their findings will be disclosed today, Reside said.

Employees at the Sangamon County coroner’s office were working diligently Thursday to locate Hanson’s next of kin, but were having little luck.

“I tried to get help for him a long time ago. Now I want to make sure he gets a proper burial,” said Mike Hubbard, who knew Hanson for years. The two shared a house on West Reynolds Street for some time after Hubbard went through a divorce.

Hubbard couldn’t explain why Hanson was homeless.

“He was just like that,” he said. “His dad owned a hotel in Honolulu. I even tried to get him to see if we could contact his mom or dad a month or two ago, when I talked to him. I was going to try to get him some public aid help or Social Security disability, but he didn’t want to. He was like a brother to me.”

Hubbard said he believes Hanson’s mother lived in Texas at one time, but Hanson rarely spoke of her or other family members.

Hanson did stay at the Helping Hands homeless shelter from time to time, according to one woman who said he occasionally would drink coffee with her and a few others early in the mornings before they all went their separate ways for the day.

He’d been in the Sangamon County Jail as recently as May 11, when he was discharged after being jailed overnight for disorderly conduct.

Hanson had had several run-ins with police and was arrested at least 14 times for trespassing, which is what he was doing when the abandoned house on 11th Street caught fire about 9:45 p.m. Tuesday.

City officials inspected the house March 15 and posted notices prohibiting occupancy. But Hanson and other homeless people regularly came and went from the building, which still contained the former resident’s clothes, medical equipment and other belongings.

The resident, an elderly man, entered a nursing home in Petersburg several months ago because of failing health, neighbors said.

Neighbors reported seeing animals going in and out of windows at the abandoned house, which has an overgrown yard and a large setback from 11th Street. A railroad track runs behind the building.

In May 1997, Hanson was found unconscious, bloody and badly beaten inside his motel room at the Bel-Aire Motel, 2636 S. Sixth St. He was rushed to Memorial Medical Center with what was considered a life-threatening head wound. Police never revealed a motive for the attack.

Hanson, who moved to Springfield about 1994, at one time was a carnival worker, but he was a roofer at the time of the 1997 attack, according to Hubbard.

“I tried to have him get hold of his family and he wouldn’t do it. I tried to get him help because he got beat so bad in that hotel. He was in bad shape,” he said, adding that he believes Hanson recently had been running with a bad crowd of people. “It’s just sad.”

Ralph McCarty, an associate pastor at Christian Assembly Church, 2105 Reservoir St., became acquainted with Hanson several months ago, when Hanson began showing up for Sunday evening worship services and spending the night behind the church.

McCarty, who put out a pillow and blanket for Hanson to sleep on, said Hanson once explained that he liked to sleep there because no one bothered him.

He said Hanson always was alert during church services and paid attention to what was going on around him.

“He was not one of those people who came in to see what they could rack up,” he said, adding that Hanson from time to time would offer change for the church collection plate.

Hanson would not talk about his childhood with McCarty, but did mention that his parents had divorced when they lived in Hawaii and that he, his mother and his brother then moved to Texas.

McCarty said he tried to get Hanson an apartment, but a lot of people wouldn’t rent to him because of his drinking.

“He was really a good guy. He had a serious problem with drinking. I think he needed medical attention for his alcohol problem. I was thankful we had some time to spend talking. But as a homeless person, he never asked for nothing,” McCarty said. “Truly, in my heart, I believe he wanted to change, but just couldn’t.”

Janette Boedigheimer, a deputy Sangamon County coroner, said the coroner’s staff has been doing a lot of footwork in trying to locate Hanson’s family. They did learn Hanson’s parents’ names.

“We do have a couple of leads, but we don’t have anything confirmed yet,” she said. “We’re getting bits and pieces from different people. I’ve called some other agencies and gotten some things from them. We’re trying to look at the big picture, and trying to narrow it down. We’re hoping to find somebody who can lead us to the family somehow.”

Fire victim set blaze himself / Needed light to search for food in abandoned house
 June 11, 2005

The homeless man who died in a house fire Tuesday night set the fire himself in an attempt to create light so he and another man could search for food, investigators said Friday.

Meanwhile, city homeless shelter officials expressed frustration Friday that they were unable to do more to prevent such a tragedy from happening.

Springfield Fire Department investigators said the second homeless man came forward to tell them what caused the blaze that ultimately killed Edward R. Hanson, 41. That man, who has not been named, could be charged with trespassing but has not been arrested.

The two entered the abandoned house at 1826 N. 11th St. and were looking for canned goods about 9:45 p.m. The second man went into the kitchen, and Hanson went into a front bedroom, presumably to see what he could find there.

The front room was the location of the only possible exit, investigators said.

Hanson started a small fire to create light to see by, but it quickly grew, investigators said. The second man saw the fire getting out of control and ran past the flames and out of the house. Hanson tried to get out through a bedroom window, but was unable to escape before being overcome by smoke.

The second man told investigators he could hear Hanson screaming for help, but was unable to assist him.

Firefighters arrived to find flames shooting out all the windows and openings of the house, which city building inspectors posted with occupancy-prohibited signs after a March 15 inspection.

After extinguishing the fire, firefighters checking the structure found Hanson’s body in the bedroom. Sangamon County Coroner Susan Boone pronounced him dead at 10:22 p.m. An autopsy Wednesday showed he died of smoke inhalation and burns.

It was not immediately known if Hanson, who reportedly had an alcohol addiction, was intoxicated at the time of the fire.

Acquaintances of Hanson said he moved to Springfield about 1994. On Friday, the coroner’s office still was trying to locate his next of kin to notify them of Hanson’s death. It is believed he was born in Hawaii and moved to Texas with his mother and brother after his parents divorced.

Hanson worked day-labor jobs, occasionally stayed at the Helping Hands shelter and recently had been attending services at the Christian Assembly Church on Reservoir Street.

The house on 11th Street was abandoned several months ago when the owner, John Lyons, entered a nursing home, according to_ neighbors. John and Mary Lyons are listed in Sangamon County tax records as the owners. It is unknown why family or friends had not cleaned out the house or removed belongings.

The house, which was destroyed in the fire, had a fair market value of $22,254, according to the county tax rolls.

Rita Monkman-Tarr, executive director of Contact Ministries, said she had a physical reaction when she heard Hanson was the victim of the blaze.

“I had tears in my eyes and a pain in my gut. It hurt bad – in part because I knew Eddie and also because we weren’t able to stop something like this from happening,” she said.

Monkman-Tarr also is chairwoman of the mayor’s task force on homelessness. The task force was formed following the January 2004 death of 41-year-old Michael Moffett, a homeless Chicago man who had been released from prison about a month before he was found frozen to death at the Clear Lake Avenue overpass.

Moffett, who suffered from mental illness, apparently chose not to seek help from the local shelters. But after his death, local officials opened an overflow shelter in the basement of Contact Ministries to accommodate more homeless people during the winter.

Hanson, unlike Moffett, did seek shelter in the overflow facility, but beyond that would not accept help. He was considered chronically homeless.

“If you have any compassion in your heart, this is going to affect you,” Monkman-Tarr said.

She said the board of directors of Contact Ministries decided Thursday to host an overflow shelter in the basement again this winter. Otherwise, she said, officials and volunteers hope to work with other social service agencies to help homeless people get help for such problems as addiction and mental illness.

“We need to keep working with them to get the treatment they need, but we also have to be realistic to the understanding that we cannot make anyone accept treatment or decide to go through that,” she said.

Monkman-Tarr recalled running into Hanson during the city’s first homeless count the summer of 2003. She said he was “out of his head” and intoxicated. Volunteers talked to him and gave him a care package. Police officers expressed frustration about how little they could do when they encounter individuals like Hanson who are drunk and homeless, but not causing any trouble.

“They didn’t want to arrest him because they knew that wasn’t really the answer to the problem. There was no detox available. There wasn’t anything they could do with him,” she said.

Police later that night wound up arresting Hanson after he started throwing rocks at cars.

“He was a good guy. I think that every one of these people are good people, but when alcohol and other substances get hold of them, they aren’t necessarily the same people that they are when they’re not under that influence,” Monkman-Tarr said.

Planning under way for fire victim’s burial
 June 17, 2005

Officials on Thursday were beginning to plan a funeral service for a homeless man who died last week in a house fire.

Sangamon County coroner’s office employees have been unable to find anyone related to Edward R. “Eddie” Hanson to notify them of his death.

Coroner Susan Boone and Rita Monkman-Tarr, executive director of Contact Ministries, are working to put together a service for Hanson, who apparently had many friends in Springfield.

Hanson, 41, died June 7 when fire destroyed an abandoned house at 1826 N. 11th St. Hanson and another homeless man were inside about 9:45 p.m. searching for canned food. Hanson set a small fire in a front room of the house, near the only exit, so the men could see.

The blaze quickly spread. The other man ran past the flames and out the door, but Hanson was unable to escape. He died of smoke inhalation and burns.

Boone said her office has followed up on every possible lead to try to find his next-of-kin.

“We went on the Internet and got people with the same last names and called those names. We called places where he had worked, and we contacted people he had put down on his application,” she said, noting that Hanson didn’t often identify emergency contacts on his job applications.

“One person I contacted said she really didn’t know him, and it made her sad that he put her down. She said she wished she had known him and had been able to help him. That’s the kind of stuff we ran into.”

A local funeral home has agreed to provide a site for a service, and Hanson’s remains probably will be cremated and then buried in a local cemetery, Boone said. Officials still are ironing out the details, such as finding a pastor to perform the service.

Monkman-Tarr said she ran into Boone at a function Wednesday and asked if she’d had any luck finding Hanson’s family. She said she told Boone she wanted to help make sure he got a proper funeral.

“I told her that I was sure there were other individuals in the community who would want to be there, that he’d been here quite a period of time and had made friends and there would be other individuals who would want to be a part of this,” she said.

Hanson had lived in Springfield since about 1994, according to friends. They said he rarely spoke of his family but mentioned on occasion that he was born in Hawaii and he and his brother moved with their mother to Texas following a divorce.

Hanson had been a carnival worker and a roofer. He also worked day-labor jobs in Springfield.

He had been in jail on numerous occasions but recently had begun attending worship services at Christian Assembly Church, 2105 Reservoir St. He occasionally spent the night behind the church building where no one would bother him.

The coroner’s office sometimes has to bury individuals who die here with no one to claim their remains. Boone said she’s had more cases of unclaimed bodies in the past three years or so than she’s ever seen.

“We don’t have a potters’ field, and I have to take this money out of my budget to pay for it,” she said. “Thank goodness for these wonderful funeral directors. I just ask them and they just come forward and will even do a funeral service for us. I have had a bunch of those things happening lately.

“It’s really sad, especially when there is absolutely no family.”

Brother of homeless man killed in fire located
June 23, 2005A brother of Eddie Hanson, the homeless man who died in a house fire June 7, has been located and plans to attend his funeral at 11 a.m. today at Kirlin-Egan and Butler Funeral Home, 900 S. Sixth St.

Burial will follow at Oak Hill Cemetery.

Officials began planning a service late last week as the likelihood of finding Hanson’s next-of-kin diminished and several people who knew him said they wanted him to have a proper burial.

Hanson, 41, had no identification on him when his body was found inside the burning abandoned house at 1826 N. 11th St. He was homeless and, although he had many acquaintances in Springfield, rarely spoke about his family or his childhood, they said.

Several people who knew him came forward with suggestions about how officials might be able to find family members to notify them of his death, but those tips did not pan out.

Sangamon County Coroner Susan Boone said she called a man in Texas Tuesday afternoon, thinking it was a long shot that he would be a relative. The man, Kerry Hanson, returned her call that night and identified himself as Eddie Hanson’s brother.

“I left a message on his machine, and he called back,” she said Wednesday. “I told him everything that was going on and what the community was doing for Eddie.”

Kerry Hanson is expected to be at the funeral today, Boone said. Eddie Hanson apparently had siblings scattered across the country, and his mother is living, but he did not regularly keep in touch with any of them, she added.

Hanson and another homeless man were searching for food about 9:45 p.m., when Hanson set a small fire in a front room of the house, near the only exit, so they could see.

The fire quickly spread. The other man ran past the flames and out the door, but Hanson was unable to escape. He died of smoke inhalation and burns.
Two dozen attend services for man who died in fire
June 24, 2005

About two dozen people, including two younger brothers, gathered Thursday to pay respects to Eddie Hanson, the homeless Springfield man who died in a house fire this month.

John Hanson thanked those who helped Eddie, who for the most part was estranged from his family, and urged support of the efforts of social service agencies such as Contact Ministries.

“I’m glad the community is reaching out to the homeless and underprivileged,” said John Hanson, who lives in Mississippi.

He learned of his brother’s death from the coroner’s office Tuesday evening and traveled to Springfield with another brother, Kerry Hanson, for the funeral.

Officials had difficulty locating Hanson’s family because he rarely spoke of them to acquaintances in Springfield. He had no identification on him when he was found, and he did not use family members as emergency contacts on job applications and other forms.

“(Eddie) searched for happiness and meaning in the bottom of a bottle many times, and I know many of you tried to help him. I appreciate that,” John Hanson told the gathering. “The truth is, you won’t find meaning there.”

John Hanson provided answers to many of the questions people had about Eddie’s background and the possible reasons why he became homeless.

He was born in 1964 in Honolulu and had six brothers and a sister. His mother still is living. Around 1971, his mother remarried and the family moved to Dallas, which is where the children grew up for the most part.

Their stepfather left when Eddie was around 10, and “that would not have been the first abandonment he experienced,” John Hanson said.

“Unfortunately, that story plays out all across the country. The names change and the places change, but the story is the same,” he added.

Eddie Hanson got into drugs and alcohol as a teenager and made some poor choices, his brother said. At 16, he joined a traveling carnival and worked up and down the East Coast, losing touch with his family for several years.

John Hanson remembered Eddie popping in at a relative’s house one time, and then he didn’t see him again for about 20 years. “I know in my heart the boy that he was died many years ago. And the man that he became I don’t know,” he said. “I know there were probably a thousand times we wondered where he was and what he was up to.”

He said he was glad to know Eddie had developed some meaningful relationships in Springfield, and he was happy to hear people describe Eddie as a giving person.

“He gets that from my mother. He always reminded me of my mother a lot. When I hear those things about him, I think of her,” he said.

Mike Hubbard, who was roommates with Eddie Hanson at one time, said Eddie was like a brother to him.

“We had a lot of good times together. He was a very caring person. I tried to get him help, but he never would listen,” Hubbard said. “Then I moved out of my house, and he moved out onto the streets.”

Hanson’s remains were cremated and buried in Oak Hill Cemetery. Someone donated a headstone for his gravesite, and several businesses, organizations and individuals sent flowers to Kirlin-Egan and Butler Funeral Home for the service.

Hanson, 41, died when fire destroyed an abandoned house at 1826 N. 11th St. He and another homeless man were inside about 9:45 p.m. searching for canned food. Hanson set a small fire in a front room of the house, near the only exit, so the men could see.

As the blaze spread, the other man ran past the flames and out the door, but Hanson was unable to escape. He died of smoke inhalation and burns.

Jena Schuch: ‘She always had a smile’

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Jena Schuch’s death at first was though to be an accident. That’s what her boyfriend told police. He claimed she mishandled a .12-gauge shotgun and killed herself. After a two-month investigation, Springfield police arrested Schuch’s boyfriend for murder.

Schuch, a 28-year-old mother of two, had only been living in Springfield for six months. I talked to her mom and friends to find out more about her and what her life in Springfield and back home in Michigan had been like.

‘She always had a smile’ / Boyfriend charged with Springfield woman’s murder
Nov. 9, 2003

Jena Schuch came to Springfield in March hoping for a fresh start.

Eight months later, family and friends are mourning her death, shocked that her boyfriend, Phillip Peterson, is in Sangamon County jail charged with murdering the 28-year-old woman on Sept. 13.

Peterson has maintained Schuch’s death was an accident caused when she mishandled a shotgun inside the garage apartment they shared in the 1800 block of South Wirt Street. However, those who knew her said Schuch was a skilled hunter who learned how to handle a gun properly when she was 12 years old.

“I would really like to see him face to face and say, ‘Look me in the eye and tell me what happened.’ There’s just a part of me that wants to do that so bad,” said Schuch’s mother Sue Gustafson. “I have a lot of questions the more I stop and think about things. My mind keeps saying why would you do that? There is no reason. I can’t think of a single reason.”

Jeny Shanoski, one of Schuch’s friends from Florence, Wis., described Schuch as a resilient woman and a good mother who’d experienced her share of bad luck.

“She was the kind of person if I hadn’t seen her for years, if she walked through the door it would be just like I’d seen her yesterday. She always had a smile on her face. You couldn’t keep her down for long,” said Shanoski, who lives in Bloomington.

“She always seemed to bounce back. She was always OK, and this time she wasn’t. I think that was hard for people to deal with.”

Schuch grew up in Florence, a rural community of 2,300 in northeastern Wisconsin on the Michigan border, an area known for its hunting, fishing and other outdoor attractions.

A high school graduate who worked a series of waitressing jobs, Schuch had been through a difficult divorce, according to friends and family. She and her ex-husband shared custody of their sons, 8-year-old Jeremy and 5-year-old Joseph, but the boys had been living recently with him. She’d been in a car accident and at one point had no job, no car and few prospects.

“It just seemed like it was one thing after another for her,” Shanoski said. “She wasn’t blessed with money, so she always struggled with that. Not having gone to school or anything, her only option basically was waitressing. There’s not much up there, so if you get stuck up there, unless you work at one of the mills, there’s not a lot of work.”

Schuch’s brother, Jerod, was living in Springfield last spring when she made the nine-hour drive from Florence for a visit. She liked what she saw of the city and thought it might be a good place to put some distance between herself and Florence, with plans of eventually moving back to Wisconsin to be near her boys. She’d developed an interest in auto-body work, something she considered as a possible career.

She landed a job waitressing at Smokey Bones restaurant and began dating Peterson, a 22-year-old U-Haul employee she met through her brother.

The two eventually began living together in a garage apartment behind Peterson’s great-grandmother’s house. They had no telephone in the apartment, which made it difficult for family and friends to reach Schuch. They usually left messages with the grandmother, and Schuch eventually would call them back.

Schuch called both Gustafson and Shanoski the afternoon she died. She had been planning to visit her mother that weekend, but Peterson’s truck needed repairs and she had to postpone the trip. She was in a good mood and doing laundry. She told Gustafson she and Peterson had been working hard, so they were going to rent a movie that night.

“I was very happy to talk to her. I was missing her because I hadn’t talked to her in a couple weeks. I told her I miss you and love you. I was so looking forward to seeing her,” Gustafson said.

Shanoski said the afternoon of Schuch’s death was the first time they had talked in several weeks. Schuch called her about 3:30 p.m. and they spoke for 30 minutes.

“She sounded really good. She said she was doing real well. Things had started to straighten out for her. She had some really good friends at Smokey Bones,” Shanoski said. “She got my number, and we were going to get together on Wednesday because I was coming to town.”

What happened after that is unclear. According to Springfield police, Schuch was shot about 6 p.m. with a 12-gauge shotgun. She was rushed to Memorial Medical Center, where she died at 8:42 p.m. while undergoing surgery for a bullet wound to her shoulder.

Peterson gave police an account of what happened, but authorities said there are inconsistencies. He told investigators he was moving the shotgun and Schuch asked him for it. She handed it back to him, allegedly with the barrel pointed toward her, and the gun went off, according to his account.

“I called him and asked what happened,” Gustafson said. “He said he tried to save her and he couldn’t. He was crying pretty hysterically.”

Police arrested Peterson on Oct. 22. He is charged with three counts of first-degree murder and is jailed on $1 million bond. Peterson apparently tried to kill himself at least once, and a judge has ordered him to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. He is scheduled to appear in court again in mid-December.

Gustafson said Schuch’s boys are coping with their mother’s death, and added it is painful to know Schuch will never again help them with homework, carve Halloween pumpkins with them or teach them about fishing. She said the boys have been asking questions about heaven and how to get there.

Shanoski said she has difficulty talking about Schuch’s death.

“I wish to God I’d just said to her, ‘Come and stay with me.’ And I wish I’d tried harder to find her. I called her work, I called his grandma, but I always thought I’ll be there next week. It makes me wish I’d found out where that restaurant was and gone and told her I’m going home this weekend, do you want to go,” she said.

To help her cope with her friend’s death, Shanoski has written down some memories, recalling a prom they both went to, skiing escapades that included a piggy-back stunt, riding all-terrain vehicles and spending their summers together on Fisher Lake.

“She was fun. She just had a way about her to make people laugh. She came over here one night, and we sat in the basement and laughed for hours about the stupid things that we used to do. We got in a lot of trouble together. We always said to each other, ‘Let’s go do something so we have something to tell our grandchildren about,’” Shanoski said.

“It’s just a lot easier to believe it was an accident. I never imagined it would hurt so bad. I never imagined anything like this could happen.”