Woman attacked by dogs sues their owner

A Waukegan woman mauled by a pair of pit bulls has filed a lawsuit against the dogs' former owner.

Kiara Lynn suffered "severe and permanent injuries" when she was attacked by the dogs on Sept. 11, her attorney Donald Morrison says in the suit.

Morrison claims the dogs, Tiger and Widow, were known to their owner John Hodnick to have "vicious propensities to attack people and bite people without provocation."

Lynn suffered injuries to her scalp and ear and had several bite marks to her body when the dogs broke loose of chains securing them to the porch of Hodnick's home and attacked her.

Hodnick, who could not be reached for comment, heard the dogs and was able to remove them from Lynn, and they were later euthanized by animal control officials.

Morrison's suit, which seeks more than $50,000 in damages, charges Hodnick did not do enough to secure the animals and prevent the attack.

A scheduling conference has been set for Jan. 14 before Circuit Judge Margaret Mullen.

Bad attitude:

Loose lips sink ships, and a pair of them almost torpedoed a Lake County jury this week.

A panel of jurors was being chosen in the courtroom of Associate Judge Christopher Stride to hear the residential burglary case against Diego Mayhone.

Stride was briefing the jurors on the basic facts of the case and happened to mention that Mayhone lives in North Chicago.

As Stride later found out, a man who had already been chosen for the panel was heard remarking "Well, if he is from North Chicago, we already know he is guilty so why don't we just hang him now?"

A person not chosen for the jury heard the comment and reported it to the deputy sheriff in Stride's courtroom at the end of the day Monday.

Tuesday morning, the trial was supposed to start, but the parties reached a plea agreement that undid the necessity for the trial.

But Stride had no intention of letting the juror's remark go unchallenged and he called the entire panel back into the courtroom.

Without singling the man out, Stride said he had been informed of the comment and said that if he had heard it himself he would have had the man arrested for contempt of court.

Any other jurors who heard the remark may also have had to be excluded from the panel, he said, meaning that everyone's valuable time spent selecting the jury could have gone to waste.

"In courtrooms there are presumptions, there are protections and there are rights," he told the jurors. "And a remark such as that, which is intolerable in every way, flies in the face of what makes this nation different from any other on earth."

Judge honored:

Circuit Judge Victoria Rossetti has been named the recipient of the Impresa Award from the Women's Division of the Joint Civic Committee of Italian-Americans.

The award is given to honor Italian-American women who have demonstrated outstanding service for the betterment of their communities.

Rossetti, who has served as a circuit judge since 2002, is currently serving in the felony division of Lake County circuit court.