Guns ablazin’

Posted on April 29, 2009 by Jayette Bolinski

After the city of Springfield hosted a gun buyback program in 2007, I started pestering the folks at the police department about following along to watch the guns get destroyed. After months of documenting, processing and background-checking all the guns, they finally invited me observe the process of getting rid of the more than 500 guns and other evidence.

This story was a ball to report. The officers on the police department’s evidence destruction team were fun and knowledgeable. Watching them go through all sorts of old evidence was interesting, but getting to go inside a Bartonville foundry to watch the guns as they were dumped into the white-hot flames of a furnace was a sight to behold.

Hundreds of city buyback guns fed to foundry’s furnace / Old paperwork and evidence, illegal drugs also destroyed
May 27, 2008

The idea of a gun buyback, during which Springfield residents could turn over their unwanted weapons to police, no questions asked, seemed like a good one last fall.

The offer turned out to be far more popular — and expensive — than expected. And it culminated last week when nearly 500 buyback guns — plus a variety of drugs, paperwork and other no longer needed crime evidence — went into a 3,000-degree furnace at the Keystone Steel and Wire foundry in Bartonville.

When the buyback was envisioned, the idea was to get guns off the street, cut down on violent crime, and maybe decrease the number of firearms stolen during residential burglaries, city leaders reasoned. To sweeten the deal, a $100 Visa debit card was offered for every gun turned in. Organizers guessed officers would collect 150 guns — tops.

By the time the four-hour buyback was over, police had amassed 526 guns, including everything from rusty pistols with no visible markings to antique, wood-handled hunting rifles and two starter pistols. They had to issue IOUs for additional debit cards.

Next problem: what to do with all those firearms.

Evidence technicians examined and identified the guns, traced serial numbers to make sure the guns hadn’t been used in any crimes, and determined if any had historical value. The rest were prepared for destruction.

Seven months later, with police officers watching every step of the way, 478 of the buyback guns were bagged, hoisted 100 feet into the air and dropped into the Keystone furnace.

Evidence technician Bobby Dorsey, a city police officer, and Lt. Jim Henry, dressed in hard hats, protective goggles and gloves, were inside a foundry control room as guns began to curl and fall out of the bottom of four bags hanging over the furnace. A dramatic fireball erupted from within the furnace as the evidence fell in, and the heat could be felt through the glass window of the control room.

“Man, that sure was something,” Henry said later.

In addition to the guns, the officers burned marijuana, hashish, prescription medication, drug pipes, knives, clothing, bloody sheets and clothing, paperwork and other items of evidence that had been approved for destruction.

The burn was part of an evidence-destruction process that happens several times a year.

The Springfield Police Department follows strict rules that dictate how and when evidence can be destroyed, who participates in the process, who oversees it and who must sign off on it. Some evidence, including material from homicides, can never be destroyed, meaning the department is indefinitely responsible for holding those items.

The process is cumbersome, but with good reason — police want to ensure they never destroy something that isn’t supposed to be destroyed.

Michelle Lauterbach, a civilian police employee who coordinates the evidence section, estimated the process of disposing of a single piece of evidence takes about three months from beginning to end, once a case has been closed out and the statute of limitations is up.

Once officials determine an item is eligible for destruction, they determine if the associated court case or police investigation is closed and then try to find an owner for the property if it can be released.

Some things can’t be returned, such as ammunition, guns that belonged to convicted felons and drugs.

“But if it is something of significant value, then by law you do have to return it to the owner,” Lauterbach said.

When an owner is located, she sends a letter offering to return the item. If no one responds after 30 days, police can begin the destruction process, which involves several steps, including several officers double-checking paperwork against the item itself to make sure the correct evidence is about to be destroyed. Each officer has to sign off on the process, and they all have to be present during every step of the two-day procedure.

“You have to get a lieutenant, a supervisor, an officer, an evidence officer and a sergeant, and all their schedules have to be on the same day, and the burn or landfill facility has to be open on the same day, because every single one of those people have to sign off,” Lauterbach noted.

The team makes roughly two trips to a foundry each year to burn evidence. Some items, such as batteries, videotapes, liquids, ammunition and excessive amounts of paper, can’t be burned at the foundry, so it goes in a landfill.

Foundry helps police agencies recycle unwanted evidence
May 27, 2008

BARTONVILLE — All of those unwanted guns Springfield police collected back in October by now have become fences, facemasks for football helmets or spiral notebook wire.

Keystone Steel and Wire, the Bartonville foundry where a recent evidence burn took place, often helps law enforcement agencies get rid of unwanted evidence, mostly drugs and weapons. The company has worked with Springfield and Bartonville police, the Peoria County Sheriff’s Office, Illinois State Police, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, to name a few.

The actual destruction is a dramatic sight, with flames and sparks shooting from the depths of a 180-ton electric arc furnace, the eruption of a white-hot fireball and the buzz of blue-tinged electrical current melting down the metal.

Workers loaded hundreds of guns, along with some drugs, clothing and other weapons, into four large bags made of Tyvek. The tops of the bags were cabled together, moved into the foundry building, attached to a hook and hoisted 100 feet into the air.

Below, sparks and flames could be seen shooting from the arc furnace, where scrap metal is heated using electricity and oxygen until it is melted. The temperature inside the furnace reaches 3,000 degrees.

After the furnace was emptied and taken offline, the four bags of evidence slowly moved into place overhead. Even before being lowered, the intense heat caused the bottom of the bag to burst open. Guns tumbled out into the furnace.

As soon as the evidence hit the inside of the furnace, a large glowing fireball erupted. The intense heat of the fire could be felt inside a sealed control room a safe distance away. The fireball was caused by the scrap hitting the molten heel of steel inside.

After that, a hulking scrap bucket was lowered into the furnace — 285,000 pounds of scrap is added on the first charge and between 115,000 and 125,000 pounds on the second.

Three carbon graphite electrodes — 24 inches around and 27 feet long — then are lowered into the furnace, and an electrical current is passed through them to melt the scrap.

The Springfield Police Department’s evidence became billets, which are 5-by-5-inches and cut into 50-foot lengths. They are sent to the rod mill for rolling, where they are reduce to a round rod in diameters from 0.219 inches to 0.594 inches.

The rods are coiled into 4,100-pound units, one for each billet, and can reach a length of up to 6 miles, depending on the diameter of the rod.

The coils then are sent to the wire mill, where they become fence products, such as barbed wire, stockade panels or garden fence. The coils also are sold to other companies for their production applications, such as grill screens, facemasks for football helmets and spiral notebook wire.

The foundry temporarily goes offline to accommodate evidence destructions.

Doug Harper, manager of health and safety for Keystone, works closely with law enforcement agencies to schedule the burns.

“The operation is hindered by the destruction, but not enough to cause delays of any concerns,” he said. “For example, a 15-minute delay can cost the company $215 a minute.”

That works out to $3,225 per burn. Springfield police said Keystone does not charge them to burn evidence, something they greatly appreciate.

Broken life: Jerry Gaston’s story

Posted on April 28, 2009 by Jayette Bolinski

jerryandkids2

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.

Boy’s pool stolen from his backyard

Posted on April 27, 2009 by Jayette Bolinski

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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.”

Police reopen 2002 death case

Posted on April 27, 2009 by Jayette Bolinski

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.”

Like father, like daughter

Posted on April 27, 2009 by Jayette Bolinski

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In June 2006 I was able to profile Gerry Castles and his daughter Rikki Castles-Zajicek, the Springfield Police Department’s first father-daughter cops. My favorite quote is when Gerry told me about seeing his daughter in her uniform for the first time and he flashed back to when she used to dress up in his uniform as a child.

The photo, taken by former SJ-R intern Dave Albers, is a favorite of mine, too. I love how Gerry is all buttoned up and seasoned-looking, and Rikki is young and fresh-faced.

Like father, like daughter / Two Springfield police officers form first pairing of its kind
June 18, 2006

Springfield police officer Gerry Castles was taken aback the first time he saw his daughter, Rikki, in a police uniform.

“It was as if, ‘Why are you playing dress-up in my uniform again?’” he recalled thinking when he saw her standing with other cadets at graduation from the police training academy. “There’s just an overwhelming sense of pride. It’s really crazy. It’s strange, and I like it.”

Gerry Castles and his 25-year-old daughter, Rikki Castles-Zajicek, have the distinction of being the first father-daughter officers with the Springfield Police Department. There have been numerous fathers, sons and brothers on the force at the same time, but this is the first time the department has had a father and daughter, according to police officials.

Police work runs in the Castles family – Rikki married Springfield police officer Tim Zajicek on June 26, she has a cousin who is an officer in Idaho, and Gerry’s great-great grandfather, H. Scott Castles, was Springfield police chief in the early 1900s.

Rikki, 25, a Lutheran High School graduate, earned an associate’s degree from Springfield College in Illinois and a bachelor’s in anthropology from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. She was going to pursue a master’s in teaching but changed her mind.

“I think growing up around it, I never thought I wanted to do (police work). There’d always be cops around our house, and I’d think, ‘Why would I want to do that?’ I wanted to do something different,” she said. “So it was a shock to me.”

Gerry, 49, a Springfield patrol officer for 12 years, works the midnight shift and is part of the department’s emergency response team and its honor-guard unit. He’s also a field-training officer.

He carries a laminated wallet-size copy of Rikki’s birth certificate with her baby photo on it in his uniform pocket.

He said Rikki initially didn’t go around telling everyone she was interested in becoming a police officer.

“I think she’s a lot like I am – if I’m going to go for something, I don’t talk to anyone about it until it’s time,” he said. “I never in my wildest dreams thought she’d go for it. We used to sit around and tell stories about work, and she’d say, ‘Stop all this cop talk.’”

Rikki said her father was excited when she told him she decided to join the force. He called her once a week while she was at the training academy to see how things were going.

“He loves his job. It’s his life. Everything is police with him, which is good,” Rikki said. “We’re very close. We’re really alike in a lot of ways.

“You wouldn’t think it, but he’s a really sensitive guy. I really respect that. A lot of things he does I don’t agree with, but I really respect his personality and his sense of humor.”

Gerry said Rikki listens to all those “cop stories” now, and he’s looking forward to patrolling with her after she finishes her field training. He said Rikki has a lot of compassion, and that will make her a good officer.

Neither is worried about family ties getting in the way of doing a good job.

“I try to convey to her, ‘You’re going to have to stand on your own merits, and there are going to be some expectations there,’” Gerry said.

Rikki said she hopes her colleagues won’t think she got her job because of her dad.

“That was my worst fear when I took the job,” she said. “People think that I’m going to ride on my dad’s accomplishments. I don’t think that at all.”

Pit bull mauls second grader

Posted on April 27, 2009 by Jayette Bolinski

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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.

City police lose their ‘matriarch’ with a heart of gold

Posted on April 27, 2009 by Jayette Bolinski

It gave me great joy to be able to write a touching and well-received farewell piece about Springfield police officer Brenda Thompson, who died unexpectedly in April 2006.

City police lose one of their best-known / Death ends Brenda Thompson’s long career
April 6, 2006

Springfield police officer Brenda Thompson, a highly regarded member of the force for 27 years, died late Tuesday at St. John’s Hospital after a series of medical complications, friends and family members said.

Thompson, who turned 50 last month, had the highest seniority of any officer in the Springfield Police Department, based on the number of years she worked there.

She joined the force in February 1979 and worked as: a patrol officer; a Drug Awareness and Resistance Education, or DARE officer; Crime Stoppers coordinator from 1994 to 1999; crime prevention officer; and organizer of the department’s Neighborhood Watch and Beat Cop programs. She also worked in the narcotics section, was a field training officer and was a member of the department’s honor guard.

“She was kind of the matriarch of our department. What a wonderful woman,” said Sgt. Pat Ross, who knew Thompson for years.

“You can’t explain or put into words how much an individual like Brenda is going to be missed. I was asked how do you replace a Brenda Thompson. Well, you don’t. She was probably the most widely liked person down here. She just had a heart of gold. She was an outstanding officer and had inside of her all the things that keep us human.”

Thompson had been hospitalized for the past 21/2 weeks. She apparently developed some kind of blood disease around Christmas Eve, her life partner Laine Tadlock said, and a surgeon removed her spleen March 16. After that, she developed a staph infection and respiratory problems before going into full cardiac arrest March 20, Tadlock said. Thompson had been in a coma ever since.

“She was bigger than life. Loved everybody,” Tadlock said through tears. “Never had a bad day. Never met a stranger. Would give you the shirt off her back and be happy to do it and ask you if you needed anything else. She didn’t care whether you had a dime in your pocket or a million dollars, she treated you all the same.”

Tadlock, who was with Thompson for 16 years, said she was a fun, vibrant person who loved her family and her job and would spontaneously burst into song and dance.

“Even when she was sick and on the stretcher going to surgery. She was so looking forward to having her spleen out. She was on the stretcher and going, ‘Woo-hoo! Let’s get this over with so I can get on with my life,’” Tadlock recalled.

“She came out of surgery, and while in recovery, there was a guy next to her who was giving the nurses fits and trying to climb out of the bed. She was lying there and said, ‘Don’t make me come over there,’ and telling the nurses, ‘I’ll be right there to help you.’

“When I was waiting for her in her room when she came back from recovery, you could hear her in the hallway all the way back to her room talking and carrying on.”

Thompson was eligible for retirement but loved her job so much she wanted to stay on at least three more years. She always had a tale to tell about work.

“She’d come home and tell stories about stuff. She was going to write a book. She even had the title – ‘A Day in Blue.’ It was going to be all of her stories about being on the police force,” Tadlock said.

Kevin Keen, a retired Springfield police sergeant who was Thompson’s supervisor in the crime prevention unit, said she was instrumental in improving the Neighborhood Watch program and getting more residents involved in it.

“Anybody who knew Brenda knew of her outgoing personality. She had a bubbly attitude and could make anybody smile on their worst day. Armed with that enthusiasm, she was able to get anybody who might not want to be involved in the program interested. Many parts of town that didn’t have it before now have it because of her enthusiasm,” he said.

Thompson, who lived in a log home on six acres, loved animals and gardening and recently had begun dabbling in welding art. She also had the ability to pick up nearly any musical instrument – including the piano, banjo, violin, guitar and dulcimer – and play it by ear. She was adept at construction and carpentry work and loved children.

“She was a big kid herself,” Tadlock said.

Thompson donated her kidneys and pancreas, and her family requested that her kidneys to go children if possible.

Thompson’s friends are invited to a remembrance reception from 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday at Staab-Polk Funeral Home in Chatham. Her wishes were for a gathering for family and friends to look at photographs, share their favorite or “most annoying” memories of her and talk about all the fun they all had, Tadlock said.

In lieu of flowers, her family is requesting that donations be made to the Animal Protective League because her cat, Wally, was adopted from there and because she loved all animals.

“Wally would sleep right next to her every night with his head on her hand, and they’d have breakfast every morning together before she left for work,” Tadlock said.

“I’m going to miss her presence. She often said that people would talk to her about having everlasting life. She would say, ‘But I have heaven on earth, heaven is right here.’”

‘A dark cloud’ over police

Posted on April 27, 2009 by Jayette Bolinski

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.

Fleet weak – SPD mechanics on the job

Posted on April 27, 2009 by Jayette Bolinski

spdfleet2

One behind-the-scenes aspects of the Springfield Police Department is its mechanics. A police official back in 2005 suggested I do a story on the state of the department’s patrol cars. Floors were rusting out, engines had a huge number of miles on them and interiors were falling apart.

In tough economic times, replacing police patrol cars is nearly impossible for local governments. Springfield was supposed to have a five-year plan for rotating cars in and out, but it had not adhered to the plan. At the time of this story, the department had not gotten new patrol cars in five years.

I spent an afternoon at the department’s garage and was struck by how hard the mechanics work and how creative they could be with replacing parts and making do with what was on hand.

Fleet weak / Police mechanics forced to improvise to keep aging cars on road
Oct. 3, 2005

If you can imagine a flock of buzzards picking at a pile of bones, then it’s not much of a stretch to visualize what the Springfield Police Department’s mechanics do every day.

A row of seven retired Chevrolet Caprices and Ford Crown Victorias are lined up in a corner of the garage property on Singer Avenue. They’re squad cars that, just since June, have been deemed no longer safe for officers to drive, primarily because of rust problems.

They will be joined by five more by March, mechanics estimate.

The cars are dead in terms of their usefulness to patrol officers. They have rusty floorboards and body mounts, leaky trunks and failing engines. Their job now is to provide a pool of parts – everything from engines, doors and steering columns right down to light bulbs, radio knobs and seats – for mechanics who are doing all they can to keep the department’s fleet of aging patrol cars running in the safest, yet most economical, manner possible.

“It’s like a small little scrap yard back there some days,” said Dave Lawler, assistant superintendent for fleet maintenance at the police department. “We try and cut down on the expense as far as trying to buy new parts to put in old cars. We estimate a savings of $1,500 to $2,000 each month by using used parts.”

The Springfield Police Department has 250 vehicles in its inventory, of which 94 (38 percent) have more than 90,000 miles. Most of those – 68, to be exact – have more than 100,000 miles.

The fleet is aging quickly; 157 of the vehicles are models from 1994 to 1999. And as the cars continue to age, the pool of available used parts continues to shrink because those that are still out there, whether they’re part of the department’s fleet or sitting in a scrap yard someplace, are wearing out or getting wrecked at the same rate.

“We’re to the point where we’ve been keeping a lot of these cars alive through cannibalized parts,” said deputy chief Pat Fogleman, who heads the department’s administrative services division. “The problem is, our supply of cannibalized parts is drying up fast.”

The problem is going to worsen unless the city can come up with enough money to enable the department to begin buying 50 to 60 new cars each year and rotating the same number out of use. The department just received 10 new 2006 Crown Victorias at a final cost of $24,635 each after being equipped with lights, sirens, antennas and other necessities.

Previous five-year plans for the department have called for replacing patrol cars every four years, which is an accepted standard among police agencies and mechanics.

The last time the department got a significant number of new vehicles was in 2000, when the city bought 45 cars.

The department has numerous Crown Victorias, many of which have a problem with rusty frames. Their Chevrolets from 1994 have problems with rusty floorboards and body mounts. During the current budget year alone, the department has had to retire 10 cars because of rusty frames, Fogleman said.

In June, an officer was driving a 1996 Crown Victoria patrol car with 101,000 miles on it when the ball joint flew off. The officer lost control and hit a utility pole. He wasn’t injured, but officials are concerned about the possibilities.

“That’s the guys’ office for eight hours a day. If you were in a beater car with knobs breaking off, a radio that doesn’t work, maybe the window rolls down, maybe it doesn’t…” Fogleman said. “I think the guys understand times are tough. I don’t think a lot of people understand the abuse these vehicles go through.”

Patrol cars frequently are left idling while officers respond to calls or block off traffic, primarily because the lights and other equipment would quickly drain the batteries if the engines were turned off. An hour of idling is the equivalent of 33 miles of wear on a car, Lawler said.

Officers also often rapidly accelerate from a dead stop and/or quickly brake while speeding to a call. The equipment they carry on their belts – guns, handcuffs, pepper spray – has been known to rip the seat fabric.

The cars are driven every day in all kinds of weather. Water gets thrown up onto the underside of the cars, causing them to rust through and allowing water to seep into the trunks.

In at least one case, the front floorboard of a car rusted completely through, exposing carpet to the catalytic converter and melting the carpet.

Some squad cars use large amounts of oil between oil changes. One car used 33 quarts of oil, not counting oil changes, during a six-month period. Others were recorded as using 17, 22 and 23 additional quarts, respectively, during the same time frame.

Some cars – 25 of them, shared by all three shifts – are used as take-home vehicles, and some argue that mileage on those cars could be curtailed if officers weren’t allowed to drive them off duty. Fogleman said quite the opposite is true – take-home cars aren’t driven nearly as much as those used round-the-clock.

“The off-duty mileage really is a small part of the whole mileage thing,” he said. “We have found that the cars are much better maintained and last longer because ‘It’s mine, I can be held accountable for it.’ If you drive a fleet car, you park it at the end of the shift, and you don’t really care.”

Lawler said the best thing that could happen is the city would get in the habit of purchasing a group of new cars every year.

“Fifty cars right now would be a big help,” he said.

In the meantime, the department’s mechanics – perhaps “magicians” is a better description – will forge on. They will continue stockpiling used speedometer clusters, brackets, outside mirrors and flywheels. They will prepare for the next time they’re forced to fabricate a floorboard or trunk out of an old street sign. And they will remember that there likely will come another day when they must completely overhaul a patrol car with new doors, a new engine and a new rear axle.

“We have people who are willing to understand the importance of the savings,” Lawler said. “They’ve gone the extra mile in getting the cars back out on the road. We’ve done a lot of different things to try to save as much as we can.”

Black and blue: The history of black Springfield police officers

Posted on April 26, 2009 by Jayette Bolinski

blackandblue

My editor in 2005 asked me to research and write about the history of black officers in the Springfield Police Department. The assignment stemmed from ongoing claims of racial discrimination and bias within the department and the civil lawsuits stemming from those allegations.

I spent no less than six months researching the topic. I pored through reels of microfilm of old city newspapers, picked up books on the history of the city, spent hours at the Sangamon Valley Collection and interviewed several retired and current black officers.

Black and Blue / African-American officers struggling with racial divisions in the Springfield Police Department is nothing new.
Sept. 4, 2005

Ask Harry Draper about his 25 years with the Springfield Police Department, and he’ll regale you for hours with tales of solved murder cases, department politics and officer shenanigans.

He’ll reach into his front pants pocket and show you the badge he still carries around, even though he’s been retired since 1981.

His eyes get a little misty when he recalls the day in 1963 when he was the only black officer chosen to guard Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke at an AFL-CIO convention at the Illinois State Armory.

But not all of Draper’s memories are fond ones. When he joined the police force, even though the modern civil rights movement was gaining momentum, racism was overt and accepted among Springfield officers. Many black officers agree that the discrimination they experienced was far worse among their colleagues than anything they came across in the community.

At one time, black officers patrolled only in black areas of town and on the old “Levee,” the city’s red-light district downtown, and they did so on foot. Black detectives worked only on cases involving black suspects or victims. Promotions were few and far between.

Continue reading →

Prostitution in the capital city

Posted on April 26, 2009 by Jayette Bolinski

This piece is based on my first police ride-along on a prostitution detail. What an eye-opener it was.

Police use new approach to root out prostitution / Often-ignored problem fought with stings, outreach
June 15, 2003

He had a proposition for the pony-tailed woman in jean shorts and a T-shirt who’d been standing on the corner of Eighth and Enterprise streets Tuesday night.

He could drum up work for her if she agreed to give him $10 from every trick.

“What if I only make $10?” she asked, making eye contact with men who drove slowly past, several of whom circled back.

He’d let her keep it, he said, boasting that he’s good to all his girls.

A customer pulled up to the corner then, and she jumped in his car, promising she’d return in 30 minutes with $10 for him.

The alleged pimp – a 24-year-old man wearing a hockey-style jersey – strolled to a picnic table in the park nearby, lit a cigarette and waited.

Little did he know, the woman wasn’t a hooker at all. She was a decoy working undercover on a prostitution sting with a team of Springfield police officers. Her “customer” actually was another undercover officer.

Police, armed with two-way radios and binoculars, had watched the conversation take place. While the decoy and her “customer” waited a few blocks away, officers broke out law books to look up definitions for pimping and pandering. Pimping arrests are rare, they said, and they wanted to make sure this one held up.

Thirty minutes later, the woman returned and handed the man a $10 bill. In seconds, five marked Springfield police cars swooped in and surrounded him.

Robert D. Brown of the 1500 block of East Brown Street was taken to jail. Police said they also found drug paraphernalia in his possession.

“You’ve really got to be an actor to do this,” police Sgt. Bill Neale noted after congratulating the decoy and other officers on a job well-done. He oversees many of the highly organized, and potentially dangerous, prostitution stings, which rely on officers to volunteer as decoys.

“It takes a special kind of person to get out there and do this. We want to have fun, but you have to stay sharp. You have to keep your wits about you,” Neale said.

Prostitution, primarily a drug-driven crime, is a nuisance that has ripple effects throughout the community, according to local police and social workers.

But it’s a problem that largely is “ignored and forgotten,” according to Jody Clark, an outreach coordinator with PORA (Positive Options, Referrals and Alternatives), which helps women who have a history of prostitution and exploitation by providing a safe residence for them, treatment programs, counseling, outreach, education and referrals.

“Not only do we see their lifestyles, we see the addictions that pull them into the lifestyles,” Clark said. “I’d say almost 100 percent of our women and men who are prostitutes are addicted to drugs, and most of the time it’s crack. Addiction is very powerful.”

Springfield police have adopted a new approach to combating the prostitution problem. It includes a combination of stings, which tend to have a highly visible yet temporary effect; neighborhood involvement; cooperation with PORA; and police interviews with arrested hookers to glean such information as where they live and work, where they turn tricks, why they prostitute, whether they’ve been arrested before and who they associate with.

“With prostitutes, you arrest them tonight and they’re back on the streets tomorrow. They’re not doing it for fun; they’re doing it out of necessity,” said assistant police chief Bill Pittman.

“We’re trying to deal with the whole problem instead of just the symptoms. We’re looking at these women and saying, ‘Why are they doing this here?’ In Springfield, it’s most likely because it’s easy to get the money – and significant amounts of money in some cases – to support a pretty serious drug problem.”

Police have scheduled 10 stings from May through August. Two already have taken place, including the one Tuesday night that netted five arrests. The other, May 29, resulted in four arrests. Charges typically range from prostitution and soliciting a sex act to pimping and drug offenses.

Pittman said the department has a list of about 40 known prostitutes, a quarter of whom are working at any given time.

Neighborhoods in which prostitutes are most active, according to police, are those along the North and South Grand avenue corridors; the area around Iles Park, which is not far from South Grand; Enterprise Street around Eighth and Ninth streets; and parts of an area known as Old Aristocracy Hill, a neighborhood bounded by Second and Ninth streets and Capitol and South Grand avenues.

“We see the worst of the worst,” said one resident of the southern part of Old Aristocracy Hill. The woman asked that her name not be used for fear of retribution by several pimps who live and work nearby. The pimps regularly try to intimidate and threaten residents by following them, banging on their doors and invading their homes, she said.

“We’re very, very frightened of them. They know who you are, what you drive and when you leave. They’re very terrifying,” she said.

“The danger with prostitution really is the pimps and the drugs. We get used condoms and used needles on our properties. It’s not nice when you try to come home in the evening and the only entrance to your driveway is blocked because a trick is being turned,” she said.

Prostitutes often walk the streets in the broad daylight, sometimes starting about 2 or 3 in the afternoon and continuing through the night, she said, though the activity tapers off in the winter.

“There have been times when we’ve had to call police up to 20 times a night. One night I saw seven girls out working. Isn’t that amazing? They know how to walk down the street and not look like they’re prostitutes, and they know who to look for, and they have hiding spots where they go when the police arrive.”

The woman added that people cruising for prostitutes are a nuisance, too.

“A huge problem is that these girls are very popular. They’re off the street as much as they’re on the street. They come and go and come and go. When you come through here and don’t see one, it’s probably because they’re working. Wait 15 minutes and they’ll be back,” she said.

Crack cocaine overwhelmingly is the drug of choice of prostitutes. Officials told of a woman who lives 30 miles away, drives to Springfield once a week and turns enough tricks to afford a week’s supply of crack.

Police said highly addictive methamphetamine also is showing up more in the city now, and some prostitutes are beginning to use it.

Referrals to PORA, which can help prostitutes get drug treatment and other assistance, is a key to the police department’s approach.

“We know these gals aren’t going to go away forever. We don’t care about what PORA has on these girls. But we want to make sure they have what we have,” Pittman said, noting that PORA is better equipped than the police to deal with prostitutes’ addictions, depression or other issues that can cause an arrest to become a crisis situation.

Clark of PORA agreed. She spends most of her time distributing condoms to prostitutes, teaching them about HIV and talking to them at shelters, in bars, on the streets and in jail.

She said most prostitutes have problems besides addiction – grief and childhood issues, sexual abuse, homelessness, the loss of children due to their lifestyles, legal problems and mental illness.

All those issues make prostitution a problem that affects the entire community, she said.

“People have to know this is taking place. … We know we have a homeless problem, we have people who are starving, we have a drug problem, and we do have a prostitution problem. We see it every single day,” she said.

Penalties for prostitution vary, according to Mark Silberman with the Sangamon County state’s attorney’s office. It is a misdemeanor, but multiple prior charges can cause it to be upgraded to a felony.

The misdemeanor is punishable by up to a day less than a year in jail.

The law requires that people arrested for prostitution be tested for sexually transmitted diseases. The state’s attorney’s office also requires they go through a drug and alcohol evaluation.

The penalty for the felony charge is one to three years in prison, with the possibility of probation or conditional discharge. Silberman said the state’s attorney’s office actively seeks to prosecute people arrested for prostitution, but other officials said they believe it’s rare to find anyone serving time for the offense.

For now, residents such as the one on Old Aristocracy Hill say they’ll continue to call police whenever they see prostitution activity in their neighborhoods.

But, the woman said, are the laws strong enough to have any effect?

“I think (the police details) are great, and they work that night, but the girls come right back the next night. And there is very little the police can do because of the way the laws are written,” she said.

“Proving prostitution is darned near impossible, and proving pimping and solicitation is darned near impossible. There’s not a lot of point in it. I think the police department does what it can, but it has to be terribly frustrating to do a job where you’re basically set up to fail by virtue of the way the laws are written.”

Body found in refrigerator

Posted on April 26, 2009 by Jayette Bolinski

The story of Paulleen Godoy, a homeless prostitute with no family locally, will always stick with me.

Paulleen was murdered and her body stashed in a nonfunctioning refrigerator on the city’s near west side in August 2002. It took local authorities weeks to track down her next of kin, a grandmother who lived in Washington state and could not come to Springfield to retrieve Godoy’s ashes or pay for a funeral.

Through Paulleen’s story I met a local woman named Margaret Best, a somewhat eccentric person who often took pity on those who live on the fringe of society. Margie quietly offered to pay for the funeral expenses to give Paulleen a proper funeral and burial. I went to the funeral, where several of Paulleen’s friends and acquaintances — prostitutes, homeless people and social service workers — showed up to pay their respects. There were flowers, a minister and a burial services for Paulleen’s ashes, thanks to Margie.

Margie lived alone, never married and had no children. She stepped forward an untold number of times with similar offers of money to pay for a funeral or at least make sure a lonely person had flowers at their funeral.

Margie died on Jan. 22, 2009. There were more people at Paulleen’s funeral than there were at Margie’s. I think she would have wanted it that way.

These are the stories I wrote about Paulleen’s murder:

Body found in refrigerator / Call brings police to garage on West Washington Street
Monday, Aug. 19, 2002

A badly decomposed body was found early Sunday inside a refrigerator in a West Washington Street garage, and authorities said the person might have been dead a month or more.

Authorities said the gender, race and approximate age of the person could not be determined because of the advanced decomposition. It also could not be determined whether there were wounds to the body.

Sangamon County Sheriff Neil Williamson said deputies received a call that there was a dead body in a refrigerator in a garage behind an apartment house at 814 W. Washington St. Deputies who went to the address at approximately 6 a.m. found the remains and alerted the Springfield Police Department.

Williamson said the two agencies are conducting a joint investigation of the death. Sangamon County Coroner Susan Boone said an autopsy was scheduled for today.

Williamson said the person apparently had been dead for some time.

“It appeared the body may have been there perhaps a month or so. It’s hard to say,” he said. “We have a lot more questions than we have answers right now. We’re moving backward in the investigation to try to backtrack to the people we need to talk to.”

It was not clear whether the body had been in the refrigerator much of the time or was placed there recently. Detectives were searching Sunday afternoon for a woman who was wanted for questioning in connection with the investigation.

The garage in which the body was found is on the east side of an alley that runs between Glenwood and State streets. Deputies taped off an area of driveway and overgrown yard behind the multi-unit apartment house.

There is another house just south of the apartment complex that has a front entry on the alley. The property where the body was found also is behind several homes on Glenwood Street.

A large, blue trash receptacle was inside the taped-off area. On Sunday, a parked patrol officer was guarding the crime scene.

A man who lives in an apartment building west of where the body was found said he first noticed police in the neighborhood around 7 a.m. when he was getting ready for church, but he said had no idea why they were there.

“I’ve been smelling something for a while, but I thought it was garbage. Obviously, I was wrong,” the neighbor said, adding that he did not know who owns the property where the body was found or who lives there.

“It’s a pretty good neighborhood,” the man said. “At least, that’s what I thought.”

No one answered the door at any of the apartments at 814 W. Washington St.

Another resident who lives nearby on Glenwood Street said several homes in the area have been converted into apartments, causing the neighborhood to become more transient.

He said people often use the alley where the body was found to get through the neighborhood.

The man also said the residents of a house at the corner of Washington and Glenwood were evicted recently. A wet mattress and other belongings were heaped in a pile near the sidewalk in front of the house Sunday.

Families await word from missing relatives / Body found in refrigerator raised fears
Tuesday, Sept. 3, 2002

When Linda Persinger read in the news two weeks ago that a badly decomposed body had been found inside a refrigerator on West Washington Street, she immediately feared it was that of her nephew, Duane Grant.

Grant turned 28 on Aug. 25. His family has not seen or heard from him since late November. Though he has an alcohol problem, according to his family, they say he has never wandered off for months at a time.

While the body in the refrigerator was not Grant’s, that has done little to allay his family’s worst fears.

“I thought, ‘That’s going to be my nephew. That’s going to be my nephew they pull out of that refrigerator,’” Persinger said, bursting into tears. “When you put something like that in the paper about somebody being found in a refrigerator, you don’t know what I went through. It was a relief when I found out it wasn’t Duane. I prayed to God that wasn’t my nephew.”

Persinger was not the only person who had fears about the body in the refrigerator, which turned out to be that of a Springfield woman named Paulleen Godoy. Authorities received numerous calls from people wondering if the body could have been that of a missing loved one.

As of last week, the Springfield Police Department had between 30 and 40 people on its missing persons list.

Missing persons remain on the list indefinitely until they are found or until someone calls police to say they’ve returned home.

“The number fluctuates daily as those who are missing come home and others are reported missing,” said police department spokesman Sgt. Kevin Keen.

The problem with reporting adults as missing, Keen said, is that adults are free to come and go as they please.

“We still treat every missing report as a valid and legitimate missing person. We actively pursue them,” he said. “We don’t list an adult as missing unless foul play is suspected or they have a diminished mental capacity.”

Police place more emphasis on looking for people who are considered “missing critical,” which includes children who have disappeared, people who might have met with foul play and those who are suicidal or who suffer from diminished mental capacity.

If police need to, they might ask television and radio stations to broadcast a description of the person. The police department also can make use of its “City Watch” system, which is a computer program that allows officers to call everyone in the area where the person was last seen.

For Persinger, the hope that police will find her nephew fades a little each day. She filed a missing persons report with police in February, but she hasn’t heard anything from authorities since then.

Police say there at least two outstanding warrants for Grant’s arrest, which could account for his disappearance. But Persinger said Grant never could stay away from his family for long and often came around for money.

“We still have his tax forms that he’s not come around to fill out. He would have gotten back a thousand bucks,” Persinger said.

In the meantime, she’s been checking homeless shelters and talking to people Grant knows. Most have been little help. In fact, she said, one person told her Grant is dead.

Grant is 5 feet 9 inches, 160 pounds, with blue eyes and brown hair. His last known address was the 200 block of Sangamon Avenue.

His family said they last saw him Nov. 30 at Big R, 2804 N. Dirksen Parkway. His sister gave him a ride to a cafe on North Grand Avenue, where he was supposed to have a job interview that day.

Funeral fund set up for victim / Body found in refrigerator one month ago
Wednesday, Sept. 18, 2002

A fund has been set up for donations to pay for a funeral service, burial site and headstone for a Springfield woman whose remains were found in a refrigerator one month ago.

No family members have come forth to claim the now-cremated remains of Paulleen Godoy, a 31-year-old prostitute who police believe was murdered. Authorities have had difficulty locating Godoy’s grandmother, who was last known to live in Eugene, Ore., or her ex-husband and daughter, who are believed to live somewhere in the Southwest.

Donations can be made to the Paulleen Godoy Memorial Fund at any branch of Marine Bank.

“Really, the purpose is to get her in the ground and get her a headstone,” said Paul Carlson, a retired counselor who knew Godoy because she and other street people used to stop in at his former office on South Eighth Street seeking food, money and other types of assistance.

Services will be announced but tentatively are set for later this month. Kirlin-Egan and Butler Funeral Home will handle the arrangements, Carlson said.

“She thought she was such an insignificant person. She really believed that. It wasn’t part of her game,” Carlson said. “She just really thought of herself as a nonentity in this world.”

Authorities had to use an enhanced fingerprinting process to positively identify Godoy, whose badly decomposed body was found early Aug. 18 stuffed into a refrigerator in a garage behind an apartment house in the 800 block of West Washington Street.

Authorities have refused to say how she was killed.

Robert Reynolds, 35, of the 900 block of North Eighth Street remains jailed on $50,000 bond for allegedly failing to register as a sex offender. Police have not called Reynolds a suspect in the Godoy murder, but they have said they wanted to talk to him as part of their investigation.

Reynolds reportedly lived in the house in front of the litter-strewn garage where Godoy’s body was found.

Springfield police said Tuesday they have no developments to report regarding their investigation of the murder.

Carlson said that Godoy, whose street name was “Spooky” and was called Paula by those who knew her, arrived in Springfield in either 1995 or 1996 on a bus from Florida after she had gotten into some kind of trouble there. He first met her in 1997 when he found her sleeping in the back of a van that was parked behind his office on Eighth Street.

Carlson said prostitutes, who have been known to frequent that area, often stopped in at his office seeking food or other types of help.

“I always told them if it’s cold outside, you can come in and have a cup of coffee as long as you don’t disrupt anything going on inside,” he said, adding that Godoy, who was homeless, made his office into her base of operation as far as getting phone messages from family members and leaving important documents there for safekeeping.

He said Godoy sometimes talked about her personal life with his office workers, and she once mentioned that her mother died of a heroin overdose when Godoy was 13. She went to live with her grandmother, eventually took up with a man named Fernando Godoy and gave birth to a daughter named Monica. Godoy apparently had no contact with her biological father, though she did attempt to contact him once while she was living in Springfield, Carlson said.

Godoy’s daughter was believed to be about 13 in 1998 and lived with her father, who may be American Indian and living on a reservation. Carlson said a girl named Monica called his office once looking for Godoy and left a phone number with a 602 area code but couldn’t be reached after that.

Godoy’s drug of choice was cocaine, though she was known to use many types of illegal substances, Carlson said.

“In her heart, I think she really wanted out of where she was at. But the demon that is cocaine had her,” he said. “She was like a sweet 13-year-old kid. She was very needy. There were moments when you got to see through the veil and see the real person.”

Carlson said he last saw Godoy in August 2001, but she called him on the telephone about once a month after that. Then the phone calls stopped.

“Paula was always scamming somebody. ‘Can I borrow 10 bucks? I’ll pay you back tonight.’ Writing bad checks. That’s how she lived her life, literally day to day,” he said. “And she had an interesting sense of humor. When she was straight, she was very funny.”

Carlson said he believes Godoy deserves a proper burial.

“My wish for Paula is that she is at peace now because she was always struggling to survive,” he said.

Jayette Bolinski

Digital and print news professional – Editor – Writer – Multimedia producer

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