Violence in Chicago hits close to home for Mulligan

Recent reports of mob violence in Chicago brought memories from nearly 45 years ago flooding back to state Rep. Rosemary Mulligan, propelling the Des Plaines Republican to begin a fight to put tougher penalties into law.

It was 1967, Mulligan recalls, and she was newly married and living in Des Plaines when her mother called — her father hadn't come to pick her up from the shop the family owned, or called that he was going to be late.

The police soon came to the family's Park Ridge home, and informed them that her father — an insurance agent who had gone to collect a premium from a customer in one of Chicago's housing projects — had been shot and killed by a group of five young men, all under the age of 20.

“I guess these kids thought he had money,” Mulligan said. “They just shot him from far away. The bullet, it hit the top of his heart.”

Mulligan's mother was left on her own, and the family went through two different murder trials, she said.

Mulligan, who is 69, says she believes her father's murder happened because the perpetrators “were poor and underprivileged.”

The ordeal had a lasting impact on Mulligan, who has fought against handgun violence and for education programs for impoverished youth since she was elected to the General Assembly in 1990.

So when she opened the paper recently and read about of a Northwest suburban man who was attacked by a group in Chicago's Streeterville neighborhood, it struck a raw nerve for Mulligan, who vowed to push legislation that would raise the bar on punishment for mob action.

“Well, when these kids decided to go on the rampage and do whatever, I got kind of angry, I thought, after all these years nothing has changed. (Yet there are a) lot of people who are poor and pull each other up by the bootstraps. They don't grow up and murder people,” she said.

Mulligan resolved to make penalties for mob action harsher, “to make sure if these young people wanted to do this they were going to go to jail.”

Current criminal penalties for street-mob related criminal acts vary, as state law separates the offenses of assault, battery, aggravated battery and mob action.

But the new proposal, introduced by Mulligan and fellow Republican Reps. Michael McAuliffe of Chicago and Angelo “Skip” Saviano of Elmwood Park, would make mob violence a class 3 felony punishable by two to five years in prison. Each representative's district includes a portion of Chicago.

Mulligan said she will work with the city of Chicago to address the issue and amend the legislation as necessary.

“I just kind of got irritated about it. ... I decided to go after them and this was it,” she said. “What they're doing is, they're killing the businesses, making Chicago look bad.”