Hearing begins to determine if man accused of shooting Bensenville police officer in 2021 was insane
Nearly four years after his career as a Bensenville police officer ended in a hail of gunfire, Steven Kotlewski this week faced the man accused of shooting him.
Kiante J. Tyler is charged with attempted first-degree murder and aggravated battery for the November 2021 shooting that severely injured Kotlewski.
Tyler has since been found unfit to stand trial. So a discharge hearing began this week in DuPage County.
At the hearing, which opened Monday, prosecutors are presenting their evidence against Tyler. The judge could acquit Tyler, find him not guilty by reason of insanity, or decide not to acquit him, which essentially would leave the criminal case open longer while Tyler continues treatment.
Kotlewski was the first person to testify at the hearing. He was questioned by DuPage County State’s Attorney Robert Berlin.
He recalled that he didn’t hear any noise or arguing when he approached a Bensenville apartment shortly before 1 a.m. on Nov. 6, 2021.
A woman had called Bensenville police to have them remove her adult son. But when Kotlewski arrived, the main door to the second-floor apartment was open. He opened a screen door as the woman, seated on a couch, told him to come in.
When Kotlewski asked the woman where her son was, she called for him to come out of a bedroom. Kotlewski asked him, “what the trouble was.”
The exchange seemed pleasant, Kotlewski said Monday.
But then Tyler fired 10 shots at Kotlewski from a 9mm handgun, and struck the officer nine times.
Kotlewski said he stepped backwards to get out of the line of fire but tumbled down the stairs.
“When I hit the deck, I reached for my pistol and pulled it from my holster. I aimed it at the staircase, but I could not see anything,” he said. He felt pain, mostly in the lower half of his body and in his spine.
Kotlewski choked up as he described a fellow officer arriving a few seconds later and starting to help him. “I felt everything would be OK,” he said.
But nine bullets had broken both his thigh bones, severed a femoral artery, and damaged his colon, his back, and a kidney, among other injuries. One bullet lodged in his protective vest.
He was hurt so badly that officers loaded him into a squad car and drove to meet the ambulance at a nearby fire station. On body-cam video played in court, someone said it was “a load-and-go situation,” with the ambulance taking off right away to take him to a trauma center.
Kotlewski, now 40, spent several months at Loyola University Medical Center and at a rehabilitation hospital. He still undergoes physical therapy and mental-health counseling. A year after the shooting, he was granted a disability pension.
Tyler’s mother, Kenya Bentley, testified that something was wrong with her son. She had called the police for help several weeks before to ask them to remove Tyler. Tyler was “just him not quite being himself, walking around and just being paranoid,” she said. The day of the shooting, he was pacing, drinking a lot of water and mumbling to himself, she said.
Tyler’s relatives have previously said they believe he suffered brain damage after smoking marijuana laced with the hallucinogen PCP.
In 2023, a court-ordered fitness report said he had cannabis use disorder, cannabis-induced psychosis and unspecified schizophrenia.
Bentley said she didn’t know Tyler owned a gun, but admitted that days earlier she had found bullets in his room. She hid them in her bedroom’s closet.
Prosecutors also played a video of detectives questioning Tyler.
Tyler told them he thought “the man” who appeared in the apartment’s doorway was going to rape his mother. He said the man was in a police uniform, but that something didn’t look right. He also said he thought the man “looked crazy.”
Detectives pressed him on that and also questioned him about his use of marijuana and whether he was upset about his mother calling the police.
The discharge hearing for Tyler resumed Tuesday. It is expected to continue for multiple days in the coming weeks.