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Elite Lake County police investigators to be honored for work in baby killer case

Officials from a statewide organization will honor the Lake County Major Crime Task Force for an investigation that led to the conviction of a man who killed a 5-month-old Zion boy.

George Filenko, the task force commander and Round Lake Park police chief, will accept the Award of Excellence on Tuesday at the annual Illinois Homicide Investigators Association conference in Itasca.

"This was a tough case across the board for everybody involved in it," Filenko said Monday.

According to the association, the Award of Excellence is presented to an individual or team of investigators who exhibited the highest level of professional dedication and diligence during a violent crime or homicide probe leading to the closure of a case. Sessions at the conference include leadership in homicide investigations and sexually deviant killers.

In September, a Lake County judge sentenced Demetries Thorpe to 30 years in prison for killing the baby, Joshua Summeries. Thorpe, 27, of Zion, who was the boyfriend of Joshua's mother, pleaded guilty to suffocating the boy and placing his body into a large trash bin, which was emptied from a truck into a landfill.

Zion residents and others banded together to search for Joshua after Thorpe initially reported he had been kidnapped Aug. 21, 2013. Filenko said what followed was the largest response in Lake County history with at least 200 local, state and federal law-enforcement personnel who assisted in the initial search.

Filenko said Thorpe observed investigators at work and moved a backpack that contained Joshua's body outside a perimeter that was established for the search. Thorpe eventually placed the backpack in the large trash bin just before it was emptied into a refuse truck, according to prosecutors who cited surveillance footage of the activity.

Investigators meticulously viewed eight to nine hours of the surveillance video before linking Thorpe to the slaying, Filenko said.

"It wasn't like you could fast forward through it," he said.

Scores of police officers, firefighters, cadaver dogs, FBI agents, U.S. marshals and volunteers from Illinois and Wisconsin national guard units performed the unsuccessful four-day search for the backpack in the landfill at Ninth Street and Green Bay Road in Zion. They used rakes and bare hands hunting for the backpack amid medical and other hazardous waste.

Many on the search team experienced stress and had difficulty sleeping because they were so invested in wanting to find Joshua's body, which was never recovered.

"I don't think people necessarily know how focused we are," Filenko said.

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Zion man sentenced to 30 years in prison for killing 5-month-old baby

  Search teams could not find the body of 5-year-old Joshua Summeries in this Zion landfill. Paul Valade/pvalade@dailyherald.com, 2013
George Filenko
Demetries Thorpe
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