Waukegan Paid $26.1 MillionTo About 50 People Wrongly Arrested

Angel Gonzalez was perplexed when a police officer pulled him over in downtown Waukegan on a summer night in 1994, ordered him out of the driver’s seat of his Cadillac sedan and handcuffed him.

It was the start of an ordeal that ended 20 years later when DNA set him free from prison and illuminated the faults of the rape case Waukegan police built against him. Gonzalez had run into a troubled police force.

Instead of holding a lineup, officers drove the victim to the scene of the traffic stop and had her look at a handcuffed Gonzalez as she sat in a squad car roughly 20 to 30 feet away, according to court records. She identified him as one of her two rapists, but Gonzalez told police they had the wrong man — he’d been with his girlfriend and her sister, and the women later testified it was true. Police disregarded the alibi.

Gonzalez, a 20-year-old Mexican immigrant, spoke limited English, but he was interrogated by an officer who spoke no Spanish, according to court records. The officer took incriminating statements in English before a Spanish-speaking detective took over about 10 hours after the traffic stop. Confused and exhausted, Gonzalez confessed, saying he’d raped the woman at the suggestion of a man he’d met by chance whose name he didn’t know.

As he sat in prison, the Lake County prosecutors who put him there grew infamous for locking up innocent men. But less widely known is the story of the police department that has stood at the core of the county’s problems with miscarried justice.

Now a Tribune investigation into the Waukegan Police Department has found a troubling history of investigative failure and abuse allegations.

No city police agency in Illinois, other than Chicago’s, shares responsibility for as many known wrongful convictions as the Waukegan police, who helped send six men to prison — some for decades — before they were cleared, according to an analysis of data from the National Registry of Exonerations. Waukegan police also have been inundated with abuse allegations, records show, and insurers and the city have paid out $26.1 million in police cases since 2006, outspending towns with more police and, in some cases, more violent crime.

The Waukegan Police Department has been led by officers who played central roles in some of the costliest investigative failures in Lake County history, and police with troubled records have flourished in the department. Scandal and instability have plagued the agency, and the city is now run largely by former officers who have given little public indication that they detect a problem.

Records show minorities have suffered most in the former industrial hub of 90,000 where a vast majority of residents are African-American or Hispanic but most police are white, including, as of this summer, all of the top command staff. Most people who received payouts from the department after alleging wrongdoing are black or Hispanic, records show.

Several experts on policing said federal authorities should intervene in the city to ensure people are protected.

“I would be afraid to live in Waukegan,” said Craig Futterman, a University of Chicago law professor who has studied police misconduct.

Mayor Wayne Motley and city attorney Steve Martin — both former officers — declined to comment through a lawyer for the city, as did police Chief Wayne Walles. Numerous recent mayors and police chiefs either declined to comment or could not be reached.

Gonzalez’s two decades in prison ended earlier this year when prosecutors, faced with new DNA evidence, said he was innocent. While he was in prison, the girlfriend he loved and wanted to marry started a family with another man, he said. At 42, Gonzalez is just learning how to be a free adult.

“That’s all I ask — to be a regular person,” he told the Tribune.

Cases add up

Police have immunity from many lawsuits, and major payouts in police cases are rare for most towns. Waukegan is not like most towns.

The city and its insurers paid or agreed to pay about $26.1 million between 2006 and April to about 50 people who claimed police had wrongly arrested, beaten or otherwise harmed them or their relatives, city records show.

“You can have a bad year or two … but (Waukegan) is totally out of whack with some of the most aggressive and largest agencies in the country,” said Victor Kappeler, dean of the College of Justice and Safety at Eastern Kentucky University and an expert on civil liability for police.

Most claims against the city were settled or resolved without a trial, and some people appear to have received payouts without filing lawsuits, records show. Alejandro Dominguez — who spent four years in prison for rape but was cleared by DNA — won a jury verdict worth about $11.4 million, covered by insurance, according to city records. That case and two other collapsed felony cases cost the city and insurers some $22.9 million. The remainder of the $26.1 million went to people who alleged brutality, among other infringements, records show.

Exonerated inmates typically sue, though Gonzalez and another inmate cleared this year have not sued the city. Other lawsuits against the department are pending.

No suburb precisely matches Waukegan’s combination of size and crime rate, but the city’s losses in police cases dwarfed other towns with large, busy police departments.

Joliet, which has some 60,000 more residents and about 100 more police officers than Waukegan, paid about $1.5 million between 2006 and April, according to city records. Joliet reports more violent crime than Waukegan to the state each year.

Insurance has covered the majority of Waukegan’s losses, records show, though it’s unclear exactly how much the city paid, in part because city officials declined to comment.

The damage has spilled beyond the city. Waukegan officers were long central to the Lake County Major Crime Task Force, and agencies that contributed police to the task force — from Lake Forest to Buffalo Grove — were sued when cases fell apart. The state, county and local towns have signed settlements worth more than $13 million in lawsuits over cases built largely by Waukegan officers.

Lawsuits still threaten Waukegan, which has faced budget deficits and cut employees in recent years.

“No city can afford this,” said Lake County Judge George Bridges, a Waukegan resident who served decades ago as the city’s police chief.

Arrests turn costly

Dozens of people have sued Waukegan police over uses of force.

In 2011, Officer Cory Kelly pulled her Taser on Quency Gilmore after responding to a fight, according to her report. He’d disobeyed her order to stop walking away, she wrote.

Video of the encounter shows that Gilmore held his hands in the air and called her “ma’am.” She told him to put his hands on a car, and he did, but then she told him to empty his pockets. He hesitated and asked “Huh?” as he put his hands in his pockets. Kelly fired the Taser, and Gilmore shrieked and flailed his arms, though he avoided the weapon’s shock. He was charged with having a small amount of marijuana, but the charge was dropped, court records show. Gilmore’s lawsuit reaped $45,000, according to city records.

“He was Tased for doing exactly what she was telling him to do,” said his attorney, Basileios Foutris. “I’ve never seen that before.”

Kelly, now a lieutenant, declined to comment.

In 2010, a shooting investigation led to police chasing Michael Denson, a felon with a prior weapons conviction, records show. Video shows a running Denson dropping like a stone as an officer fires a Taser into his back.

Video shows Denson lifting his shoulders off the ground as two other officers arrive. The footage then shows Officer Aaron Murauskas, once a lineman on Lake Forest College’s football team, delivering a kick that Denson said hit his face. Then Murauskas stomped on the back of his head, the video shows.

In his report, Murauskas wrote that Denson appeared to be reaching for his waistband — where he could have had a gun — before the officer kicked him in the shoulder, not the face. Denson reached again for his waistband, Murauskas wrote, so he tried to stomp on his back but accidentally stomped on his head.

Police did not report finding any weapons on Denson after his arrest. Charges brought against Denson were dropped. Denson received a payout of $85,000, records show.

Murauskas now works for the University of Illinois at Chicago police. He told the Tribune his report was accurate.

“We’re allowed to make mistakes. You can’t lie about it,” he said.

Denson said the video shows he was kicked in the face, contrary to what Murauskas wrote in his report.

“If they’re lying about this, then why can’t they be lying about everything else?” Denson asked.

Robert Martinez’s family also won a settlement on behalf of his father, Jose, one of several people who died after run-ins with the city’s police.

Martinez said he’s unsure why a Waukegan officer used a Taser on his father.

“My dad was completely unarmed and shirtless,” the son said. “There wasn’t anything in the situation that would have caused them to take (those) measures,” the son said.

Jose Martinez, 53, had been drinking and was agitated on the night in 2010 when police came to a liquor store for a call about someone else panhandling, according to police reports. Officer Kenneth Piton later told investigators Martinez, shirtless, moved toward police aggressively and ignored commands to stop before grabbing a towel off his neck and hurling it.

Video shows the prongs from Piton’s Taser plunging into Martinez’s torso before he drops to the ground. After a second officer had trouble cuffing Martinez, Piton shocked him again, he reported.

A pathologist ruled Martinez died of a heart ailment but alcohol and the Taser were “significant” to his death. The year before, Taser International had advised police to avoid shocking people in the chest. The Taser probes hit Martinez in the “middle chest area” and abdomen, police wrote.

Piton could not be reached for comment. Martinez’s survivors settled for $225,000, according to city records.

“It’s still just as unfortunate and saddening as the day it happened,” Robert Martinez said.

Tribune open records requests turned up no record of discipline in the Gilmore, Denson or Martinez cases.

It’s hard to determine how often officers have been disciplined after abuse or misconduct allegations. Waukegan city officials have declined to comment, and officials sometimes turn down open records requests for disciplinary records, citing various exemptions.

Racial discord

Race is woven into the history of discord between Waukegan police and civilians, according to records and interviews.

Though it is impossible to pinpoint the race of every person who sued, the wide majority of payouts since 2006 went to blacks and Hispanics. The city was about 18 percent black in 2010, but roughly 20 of some 50 people who got payouts are African-American, according to a Tribune analysis of court and prison records, news archives and information from plaintiff’s lawyers.

The police, meanwhile, are disproportionately white. As of July, all 14 of the agency’s top command officers — lieutenants, commanders, the deputy chief and the chief — were white, according to state records. Though the department of about 150 had 27 Hispanic officers, the city had 10 black police, only one of whom had risen to sergeant, state records show.

“(The lack of diversity) is inherently a problem. … Departments should reflect the populations they serve,” said Jonathan Smith, who until recently led the U.S. Department of Justice section responsible for ensuring local police departments don’t violate people’s civil rights.

The department has had minority chiefs, including Bridges, now a judge. He noted there were black and Hispanic officers in top roles when he ran the agency in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

“I look over there now and say, ‘What happened?'” he said. “It needs to be fixed.”

Some of the city’s police have shown disdain for the people who pay for their service and protection, said officers who’ve left the agency recently. Larnell Farmer, an African-American Waukegan native who retired in 2012, said there were officers he didn’t want to accompany on calls because they were racist.

“That mentality needs to change,” he said. “You work for these people that you’re trying to arrest.”

Officers fare well after wrongful arrests

The city’s police played primary roles in six investigations that led to wrongful convictions; in a seventh case, a man sat in jail for five years awaiting trial before DNA triggered his release.

In five of the cases, officers who played key investigative roles became chief or deputy chief.

William Biang helped build a 1986 rape case against Bennie Starks. He was freed in 2006 — while Biang was chief — after DNA indicated his innocence. Biang, now an investigator for the Lake County state’s attorney’s office, declined to comment.

The late Artis Yancey, who was deputy chief and chief before retiring in 2010, helped take confessions from Gonzalez and another man. The two spent 35 years total in prison before being cleared by DNA.

In 1992, Lou Tessmann — who still trains police on building homicide cases — helped take a confession from Juan Rivera in the killing of 11-year-old Holly Staker, capping an intermittent interrogation that spanned four days.

Tessmann retired as deputy chief in 2005. After DNA indicated Rivera was innocent, appeals judges freed him in 2012. He filed suit, and his attorneys touted evidence that they said showed police had tried to manufacture evidence against him before trial and may have destroyed a potential murder weapon that clashed with their theory of his guilt. He settled with authorities for $20 million; Waukegan and its insurers took the biggest hit — $7.5 million.

“A lot of people assume that because I was compensated X amount of money … I’m happy,” Rivera said. “If I was able to get my 20 years back … I would gladly take that.”

Bridges, the Lake County judge and former police chief, questioned law enforcement’s reliance on long, grueling interrogations. In several Waukegan cases, DNA or other evidence contradicted confessions that were made after extensive questioning.

“I don’t know why one would need more than a couple hours to decide whether this person is going to tell the story,” Bridges said.

Tessmann also took witness statements in the 1999 murder case against Jason Strong, who confessed after an interrogation by officers including William Valko, now a Waukegan alderman. Strong’s alleged accomplices said police bullied them into blaming Strong, and he walked free in May after medical evidence contradicted his confession and the accomplices’ accounts, raising questions as to how police could have taken statements from three men that were substantially similar but also wrong.

Strong’s arrest led to 15 years of being treated like an animal, he said.

“You’re locked in a cage for almost 24 hours per day and it’s for something you didn’t do and nobody wants to believe you,” he said.

Just as Strong’s case collapsed earlier this year, the city moved Domenic Cappelluti — who helped Tessmann take statements — from the patrol division into the investigations division, according to court and city records. He had been a detective before, and his record is marked by problematic cases.

Cappelluti was one of the last officers in the room with Jerry Hobbs before he confessed to killing his daughter and her friend in 2005. Hobbs was cleared by DNA and freed after sitting in jail for five years. Cappelluti also helped interrogate another murder suspect who confessed but was quickly cleared, records show.

The city and insurers have paid more $180,000 to settle suits filed by plaintiffs who alleged Cappelluti was among the Waukegan officers who used excessive force against them, records show. He acknowledged in court that he was once suspended for lighting a firecracker in a home while police served a search warrant, a transcript shows.

The city reported finding no record of discipline against any officer in any of the major bungled felony cases, though some officers retired or died before forensic evidence upended the cases.

Tessmann and Cappelluti could not be reached for comment. Valko declined to comment.

Administrative dysfunction, scandal

For the past decade, Waukegan has relied on a succession of police chiefs promoted from within the department’s ranks. Two were removed after humiliating the city.

In early 2013, officers were grieving for three policemen who had recently committed suicide when then-Chief Daniel Greathouse sent an email to police saying the suicides stemmed from “selfishness and weakness.” When Motley took office that year, he demoted Greathouse, who has left the department.

Motley appointed Robert Kerkorian, a friend and former colleague. But the Tribune revealed that Kerkorian had claimed that he trained to be a Navy SEAL — which he did not, according to military records — and told a colleague a vivid but false story about participating in a clandestine foreign military operation. Kerkorian resigned and moved down to commander, where he was still one of the city’s highest ranking officers as of July.

Neither Kerkorian nor Greathouse could be reached for comment.

One former officer said his complaints about the conduct of fellow officers were met with hostility from higher ranks.

In the 2000s, then-Officer Thomas Poulos tired of misconduct shrouded by silence, he said, and accused colleagues of excessive force and dishonesty. The city hired a retired state police officer to investigate, but he alleged Poulos had lied and recommended he be fired, according to court records. A Tribune records request turned up neither the retired officer’s report nor any record of discipline against Poulos. He eventually retired.

Poulos alleges his superiors went after him instead of taking his accusations against other officers seriously.

“They thought it would be easier to sweep it under the carpet,” he said.

A problem Lake County built

Lake County prosecutors have facilitated the problems of the Waukegan police. Under former State’s Attorney Michael Waller, who served for 22 years before retiring in 2012, prosecutors repeatedly pressed cases despite inconsistencies and disregarded evidence of inmates’ innocence, prolonging their time behind bars for years.

“Prosecutors are potentially the greatest instrument for police accountability that we have,” said Samuel Walker, an emeritus professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. “They can say … ‘This officer’s conduct is questionable and I don’t want to see any more of his cases.'”

In fact, prosecutors did once raise questions about the credibility of the officer whose work led to the $11.4 million payout in the Alejandro Dominguez case in 2006.

In June 1987, Matthew Chancey, then chief of felony prosecutions, sent an unusual memo to colleagues telling them to scrutinize cases brought by Waukegan Officer Paul Hendley because of “questions which exist about his credibility.” Chancey later testified that Hendley had failed to give prosecutors an audiotape of a statement related to an investigation or tell them it existed before the defendant was taken to trial.

The restrictions on Hendley were lifted under orders from Waller, then a top assistant, Chancey testified. A Waukegan command officer had called prosecutors to ask that the restrictions be lifted, Chancey said.

Two years after the memo was sent, Hendley helped build the rape case against Dominguez, who was cleared by DNA after he spent four years in prison. Jurors at the trial over Dominguez’s lawsuit against the city heard Hendley had received a report that showed the alleged victim told differing stories about her attack, but the report wasn’t given to prosecutors or the defense before Dominguez was tried, court records show.

Neither Hendley, who retired as a lieutenant, nor Waller could be reached for comment.

State’s Attorney Mike Nerheim took over in 2012 promising to reform the office, and he has cleared three men who did long stints in prison. State legislators have passed laws mandating the recording of many interrogations and the tightening of witness identification procedures. It is unclear whether Waukegan has taken its own steps to prevent wrongful convictions.

‘Something going on’

Under President Barack Obama, the Department of Justice has stepped up oversight of policing and has opened high-profile “pattern or practice” investigations, which allow the federal government to assess whether a department is infringing on people’s rights and seek reforms. The shooting of an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., for example, led to a scathing report on that police department’s shortcomings.

Jonathan Smith, the former chief of the Justice Department section that investigates local departments, said heavy legal losses suggest a problem that calls for greater examination.

“That is more than a bellwether. It really does suggest that there is something going on that needs a deeper look,” he said.

“It looks like whatever accountability systems there that you would ordinarily expect have failed,” he said.

Because city officials declined to comment, it’s unclear what changes Waukegan might have enacted to improve the department. By 2016, city officials plan to equip officers with body cameras.

City officials have defended the department in public. As aldermen voted in May to approve Rivera’s $7.5 million settlement, the city attorney, Martin, told them that cases go awry through no fault of the department or the detectives involved. No one at the meeting mentioned that the lawsuit didn’t allege mere error; Rivera’s lawyers argued police fabricated a confession and tried to create fake evidence.

Asked by an alderman whether the department’s practices had changed, Martin said city officials had been working with the agency and there were things police could “tweak.” He offered no specifics.

“The Police Department, in my opinion, as chief counsel for the city, they do an excellent job and they do their job to the best of their ability,” Martin said.

In June, three months after he was freed from prison, Angel Gonzalez sat at the dinner table of his parents’ ranch home on Waukegan’s north side as he waited for a lunch of pizza and chicken. His mother buzzed around the room offering her guest beverages, smiling as the family and attorneys celebrated a judge granting Gonzalez a certificate officially declaring his innocence.

Two decades after his life was interrupted by a late-night traffic stop, Gonzalez said he continues to find what the authorities did in his case “unbelievable.” The people of Waukegan need to ask more loudly what has gone wrong with the city’s police, Gonzalez said.

“These are the guys that are supposed to protect us,” he said.

dhinkel@tribpub.com