Carpentersville parent wants answers about drug deal gone wrong
At least one Carpentersville parent wants to know why police arranged an undercover drug transaction so close to her 10-year-old daughter's school.
The drug bust gone wrong involved police shooting into the beige Cadillac that one of the suspects rammed into an unmarked squad car at McDonald's on Kennedy Drive — near Lakewood Middle School. The Cadillac then led police on a high-speed chase through the suburbs that ended in Itasca.
At least one bullet hit the driver, who remains hospitalized at Advocate Lutheran General in Park Ridge — his condition is unknown, police said. Sentoro Dunn, 40, of the 7300 block of Ashton Villa in Rockford, was the passenger. He's charged with one count of delivery of a controlled substance and his bail was set at $1 million. Moreover, a piece of metal, which may have been a bullet fragment, struck a classroom window and tore the screen, while six students and a teacher were inside the room. The window didn't break and nobody was injured. Monique Bond, a spokeswoman with the Illinois State Police, says it's not clear whether the fragment was associated with Tuesday's shooting because the test results are not yet available.
Monica Boutwell, whose fifth-grade daughter told her about the shooting on the way home from school as an afterthought, would like to arrange a meeting with police, village leaders and parents to discuss the matter.
“I think they should take responsibility and answer questions (about) why they would do that so close to our kids' school,” Boutwell said Thursday morning. “I was really upset about it.”
But police aren't prepared to meet with the community, due to the ongoing criminal investigation and because the Illinois State Police Department's Public Integrity Unit is running its own probe as to whether the officer was justified in opening fire.
If anyone has questions about the shooting, Acting Police Chief Michael Kilbourne invites them to contact him directly by email at mkilbourne@vil.carpentersville.il.us or by phone at (847) 551-3481.
“I am open to responding to individual requests from the community and I've had a couple and I've responded to them as a police department,” Kilbourne said, noting that he has three children attending schools in Carpentersville-based Community Unit District 300. “We recognize the inherent danger around school zones and it's not something we intentionally want to increase.”
Undercover police had arranged to meet Dunn and another man to sell 1 kilogram of cocaine. As officers moved in to detain the suspects, one of the men tried to ram an unmarked police car, and police opened fire.
Police have used the location in the past to arrange undercover drug buys and would not comment on whether they would continue to do so.
Cmdr. Timothy Bosshart defended using the McDonald's parking lot, saying drug dealers feel safer selling drugs in public places. The McDonald's parking lot certainly qualifies, because it's right along Route 25 and near strip malls and the school.
About a dozen officers were involved in Tuesday's drug sting, Bosshart added.
“Any time we plan these things, the safety is uppermost in our minds and we do everything we can to avoid a risky situation like that,” Bosshart said. “But you can't always control other people's actions — in this case, the driver trying to run over the police.”
Bosshart said that in his 25 years with the department, there has been only one other case — in the late 1980s — in which an officer shot someone, he said.
Meanwhile, things have returned back to normal at Lakewood and there were no requests for counseling there, said Allison Strupeck, the district's spokeswoman.
“To the extent that it would not compromise their operation,” Strupeck said it would be nice if police kept the district in the loop about future operations near local schools. She added that she was not being critical of police.
“I would think it would be helpful to know, but then again we have tremendous respect for the very difficult work and the evolving nature of police operations,” Strupeck said.