Major court and crime stories last year in the Northwest suburbs
Once again, disgraced Illinois politicians topped the list of Cook County's noteworthy court and crime stories of the year.
His reputation and legacy in tatters after he admitted structuring cash withdrawals to avoid bank reporting regulations in a hush money payout to a former student, former U.S. house speaker Dennis Hastert was sentenced in April in Chicago to 15 months in federal prison, more than twice what federal prosecutors requested.
U.S. Federal Judge Thomas M. Durkin called Hastert, 74, "a serial child molester" referencing former Hastert students who testified he sexually abused them decades earlier when Hastert taught and coached wrestling at Yorkville High School.
Hastert withdrew the funds from his personal bank accounts in a proposed $3.5 million hush money payout to a former student called "Victim A," to keep the man from revealing Hastert's abuse. Between June 2010 and December 2014, Hastert paid the man $1.7 million.
Hastert is scheduled to be released in August.
•
Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich's rambling dissertation and his daughters' tearful pleas did not sway U.S. Federal Judge James Zagel, who upheld the 14-year sentence he imposed on Blagojevich following his 2011 conviction on political corruption charges, including trying to sell the U.S. Senate seat once held by President Barack Obama. A federal appeals court dismissed five of Blagojevich's 18 convictions but found his claims of innocence "frivolous" and evidence of his guilt "overwhelming."
Speaking via a prison video feed during his resentencing hearing in August, Blagojevich admitted to "mistakes and misjudgements" and expressed a desire to turn back the clock.
Zagel, reiterating his comments from the 2011 sentencing, described the fabric of Illinois as "torn, disfigured and not easily repaired" as a result of Blagojevich's behavior with "trust among its citizens diminished."
Blagojevich's lawyers have reportedly appealed to President Obama for a commutation of his sentence or a pardon. At present, his release from federal custody will occur sometime in 2024.
Notable convictions
A
Schaumburg mom charged with murder after she fed herself and her severely disabled daughter a lethal combination of prescription drugs, pleaded guilty to an amended charge of involuntary manslaughter in May.
Bonnie Liltz, 56, admitted she tried to kill herself and 28-year-old Courtney in 2015 because she believed she was dying from a 2012 recurrence of the ovarian cancer she was diagnosed with at age 19. Liltz said she feared for the welfare of her daughter - who had cerebral palsy, could not walk or talk and required 24-hour care - if she (Liltz) was not around to care for her.
Arguing that chronic ill health and her fears prompted her actions, Liltz's defense attorney requested probation, which prosecutors had recommended. Instead, the judge imposed a four-year sentence which Liltz's attorney appealed.
After three months in prison, the appellate court granted her attorney's request for bond during while her appeal is pending.
•
Cesar Garay, 22, pleaded guilty to killing a Des Plaines boy two years ago in what authorities described as a gang-related shooting in Rosemont. On Jan. 2, 2015, Garay got into an argument with rival gang members. As they ran away, Garay shot at them, striking Boswell who prosecutors say "was in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Garay was sentenced to 28 years in prison in exchange for his guilty plea.
• A renowned cleric pleaded guilty in August to sexually abusing a teenage girl and a 22-year-old office worker at the Islamic school he founded.
Mohammad Abdullah Saleem, 77, was sentenced to 24 months probation. As a condition of his plea, Saleem must register as a sex offender and cannot come within 500 feet of any school or university, public or private, including the Institute of Islamic Education, an Elgin school he founded for children in grades six through 12. Saleem is allowed to attend the mosque, however.
Saleem's guilty plea ends a case that began in February 2015 when Saleem was accused of sexually abusing the employee not long after she started working at the institute. In December 2015, prosecutors filed additional charges after a second accuser, a former student, came forward. She said Saleem sexually abused her from Aug. 1, 2001, to Sept. 1, 2003, when she was about 14 years old.
• A Round Lake woman who allowed 11 dogs to suffer inside a windowless van on a sweltering August day, was convicted of animal abuse in October.
Griselda Martinez, 42, was sentenced to 30 days in jail and two years probation during which time she may not own or breed any dogs.
Palatine officer Arturo Delgadillo happened upon the van in which 11 dogs were crated in cages stacked from the floor to the roof. The van was parked outside an auto-parts store. Two of the dogs died of asphyxiation.
Praising Delgadillo for his rescue efforts, Cook County Judge Marc Martin reproached Martinez for "abdicating her duties as an owner of companion animals" by "placing them in harm's way and exposing them to inhumane conditions."
Cold case solved
The
murder of an Inverness commodities broker went unsolved for years until detectives obtained a court order to record a conversation between the man's widow and her sister.
That conversation led to murder charges against Jacquelyn Greco, 69, who was married to Carl Gaimari, 34, who was found shot to death in the basement of the couple's Inverness home in April 1979. Greco and three of their four children were home at the time. Greco, her hands bound, was found in a master bedroom closet with the couple's three youngest children. Authorities initially believed that Gaimari came home early and surprised intruders engaged in a home invasion and robbery.
Instead though, prosecutors say greed motivated Greco and her then-lover - a former Chicago policeman she married four months after her husband's murder - to kill Gaimari. The former policeman has never been charged and authorities say the investigation continues.
Greco implicated herself in a phone conversation with her 86-year-old sister, Elsie Fry, in February 2013. Greco was found guilty in October in a jury trial and was sentenced Dec. 29.
Teen acquitted
The March 2014 shooting deaths of a Palatine father and his son remain unsolved after jurors acquitted 19-year-old Marco Lopez in September.
Authorities charged Lopez, a Chicago gang member, with murdering Seygundo Reynoso and his 15-year-old son Luis, because he believed Luis - a member of Lopez's gang - had snitched on him to police about burglaries they had committed.
No physical evidence connected Lopez to the murders. But a resident of the Palatine apartment where the Reynoso family lived testified he saw Lopez outside his sliding glass doors moments after the shooting. The resident testified he heard a gunshot followed by footsteps descending the stairs. The man said he saw Lopez - who lived with the Reynoso family for a time after Lopez's mother kicked him out for his gang involvement - outside moments later. The man described Lopez wearing a black hoodie and apparently concealing something underneath it.
Defense attorneys offered an alternative suspect. They another man - a member of a rival gang - killed Luis Reynoso because he believed Reynoso and Lopez had initiated the man's teenage son into their gang.
Retrials imminent
A Chicago man convicted of the 2006 murder of aspiring Rolling Meadows rapper Marquis Lovings will get a new trial. The Illinois Appellate Court ruled that Patrick Taylor's attorneys should have been allowed to introduce expert testimony about the reliability of eyewitness identification.
No physical evidence connected Taylor, 48, to the scene, but four witnesses at Lovings' condo on Aug. 19, 2006, testified Taylor and another man entered the home and demanded money and jewelry from Lovings, who authorities say made money selling marijuana.
At his 2011 sentencing, Taylor stated, "You cannot put Black Pat in jail. I'll be back on appeal."
• The appellate court this year reversed the conviction of a Park Ridge man found guilty in 2006 of throwing his 77-year-old mother over a banister in her Arlington Heights home at The Moorings. Gloria Weinke lay at the bottom of the stairwell for about 14 hours before an employee found her, according to testimony at the 2013 bench trial of her son, Wayne Weinke Jr.
Prosecutors say Weinke Jr., 60, killed his mother in a dispute over his inheritance from a family estate worth between $8 million and $10 million.
Much of the state's case rested on videotaped statements Gloria Weinke made in a deposition implicating her son a few days after the employee found her. She died several months later.
The appellate court ruled the trial judge erred when he allowed the videotaped statements because Weinke's attorneys did not have an opportunity to cross-examine the witness.
Escape attempt
The
prisoner whose not-so-daring July escape from the Rolling Meadows Third District Courthouse sparked a three-hour manhunt will spend a good part of the next decade behind bars in an Illinois prison.
Jonathan J. Scott, 24, was arrested in Elk Grove Village in July on a drug possession charge. While waiting in a holding cell for his hearing a few weeks later, Scott slipped out of his handcuffs and walked out of the building. Authorities found him a few hours later hiding in the trunk of a car parked in a garage on Kasper Avenue in Arlington Heights.
Sentenced to two years in prison on the drug charge and seven years for the escape, Scott was ordered to serve the sentences consecutively.
Outside the jurisdiction
A Palatine man faces up to 40 years in prison after pleading no contest in October in the killing of Amber Creek, a 14-year-old Palatine girl who was found dead in January 1997.
James P. Eaton, 39, was charged with first degree murder in 2014 but the charges were reduced to first-degree reckless homicide before his no contest plea because prosecutors said they were not confident a jury would determine Amber's death was the result of an intentional criminal act.
Amber vanished in January 1997 after leaving a Chicago juvenile home where she had been living. Her partially clothed body was found dumped in a Racine County, Wisconsin, nature preserve about two weeks later.
The mystery of Amber's disappearance and death remained unsolved until 2014, when scientists at an Oklahoma state crime lab re-examining cold cases matched Eaton's thumbprints with those recovered from a bag over her head.
Racine County detectives keeping Eaton under surveillance in March 2014 watched him smoke and discard two cigarettes outside the downtown Palatine Metra station, court records state. They recovered those cigarettes, took DNA samples off them and later matched those samples to DNA recovered from the crime scene.
• An Arlington Heights man was sentenced to life in prison in October for killing his estranged wife with a hatchet in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, in November 2014.
Cristian Loga-Negru's claim of insanity was rejected by a Racine County judge in July, and the same judge issued his sentence.
Authorities say that before her death his wife, Roxana Abrudan, had fled their home in Arlington Heights and was staying with her boss and his wife in Mount Pleasant. Loga-Negru, 40, tracked her to Wisconsin and lay in wait, hitting her in the head several times with a hatchet when she left the home. He put her in his car and drove to a nearby hotel where he was arrested. Abrudan died later that night in a Milwaukee hospital.
Loga-Negru, a Romanian immigrant and businessman, apologized in court, saying he had been painted as a villain but, "a villain cannot cry every night."