Midmorning, Harris saw about five men walking up the block. His crew scattered. Harris got a tap on the shoulder, then a punch in the face, according to the police report. Moments later, he was on the sidewalk, taking repeated punches and kicks and blows to the head with a metal pipe. When the beat-down finally ended, Harris told a witness that he couldn’t feel his legs.
He was rushed to Loretto Hospital, then transferred to two other hospitals—Mount Sinai and Rush—as his condition worsened. On March 19, Harris began slurring his words, and his arms went numb. Doctors put in a breathing tube; they also diagnosed a spinal cord injury. On March 21, six days after the beating, Harris died.
Police recorded the Maurice Harris case as a battery, which is indisputably true. But not as a homicide.
At first, the Cook County medical examiner’s office said that an autopsy was inconclusive. The pathologist, according to the police report, “deferred the cause and manner of death pending further studies.”
Eight months later, on November 13, the same pathologist made a final ruling—a head scratcher to every police source we spoke to who reviewed the case. Harris, the doctor determined, died from a pulmonary embolism, diabetes, and drug abuse. The police report summarized the pathologist’s findings: “The victim showed no significant evidence of injuries sustained from the battery [and] that in no way did it appear that the battery contributed to the cause of his death and therefore ruled his death as natural.”
That’s all detectives needed to close their death investigation. But they still had to wrap up the battery case. They declared it solved, reporting that they knew what had happened, knew who beat up Harris, and had enough evidence to “support an arrest, charge, and [turn] over to the court for prosecution.” But because the victim was dead and “there is no complaining witness to aid in the prosecution,” there was no reason to move forward. Harris’s attackers were therefore never apprehended.
On March 28, three weeks after Chicago filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the Cook County medical examiner’s office about the case of Maurice Harris, the office changed its death ruling from “natural” to “undetermined.” The ruling cited new information from medical records that, a spokesman for the medical examiner says, the office had requested “some time ago” but had only just received.
The current chief medical examiner, Stephen Cina, was appointed by Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle in July 2012. That was shortly after the previous examiner, Nancy Jones, retired following an avalanche of negative publicity about bodies stacking up at the city morgue.
It was also a few months after Preckwinkle and the county’s board of commissioners had passed ordinances giving themselves more power over the office—for example, imposing a five-year term limit and making it easier to fire the medical examiner by a simple majority vote. Previously, the medical examiner’s tenure could last a lifetime: a Supreme Court–like term meant to insulate the position from the political and police pressures so notorious in “Crook County.”
As the former deputy medical examiner of Broward County in famously corrupt South Florida, Cina was plenty used to politics. “If I get an inordinate amount of pressure, I don’t intend to buckle or break under it,” he vowed to the Sun-Times.
Cina says he has made numerous changes to the office to bring it more in line with national standards. “We’ve rewritten every standard operating procedure in the place,” he says. He also says that he has “tweaked” how his office assigns the cause and manner of a death. For example, he added the ruling “homicide by unspecified means”—the ruling that police used to shut down the Tiara Groves homicide investigation. “Some people may not be familiar with the term, but it’s an acceptable cause of death,” Cina insists.
Might changes under Cina help explain the perplexing findings in other 2013 cases, such as those of Maurice Harris and Tiffany Jones? There is no evidence that the medical examiner’s office intentionally issued misleading or inaccurate rulings to help the city keep its homicide count down. “I’ve never felt pressure one way or another to make my ruling,” Cina says. “I’m pro–scientific truth more than anything.”
But knowledgeable sources who reviewed these cases for Chicago say that the way the medical examiner’s rulings were worded gave police the wiggle room they needed to avoid “taking a hit” on the statistics, as one detective put it. Says a source who used to work at the medical examiner’s office: “I can see the powers that be in the police department saying, ‘Here’s our out.’”
On March 17, two days after Maurice Harris got pummeled, police were called to the top floor of a red-brick three-flat in Pilsen. A man who had just returned home from a trip smelled a “foul odor” coming from a plastic air mattress in the bedroom of a roommate he hadn’t seen in weeks. When he started pulling debris from the mattress, he saw a grotesquely decomposed human head. The rest of the body was cocooned in garbage.
Investigators opened the bag to find that the corpse was a woman’s, wrapped in a blood-soaked blanket. She was wearing turquoise jogging pants, a black camisole, a hoodie, and boots. Police identified her as Michelle Manalansan, twenty-nine, a student at Harold Washington College. She had last been seen at her downtown apartment on February 9. The police report adds that investigators were told by witnesses that the absent roommate “was the last person seen with [Michelle].”
The roommate, police learned, was wanted by the Cook County sheriff for a probation violation. They also learned that a relative had bought him a ticket to Los Angeles on a train that left Chicago six days after Manalansan disappeared.
Despite the circumstances, police classified the case as a non-criminal-death investigation. A detective soon made it an even lower priority: He suspended the case until the roommate could be “located and interviewed.”
Manalansan’s death certificate on file with the Cook County clerk’s office says that she died by homicide—specifically, blunt head and neck trauma. But at press time, her case had still not been classified as criminal. The roommate was still at large.
With a hint of disgust, one retired veteran detective who reviewed the cases of Michelle Manalansan, Maurice Harris, Tiff any Jones, and Tiara Groves for Chicago called all four “counters.” That is, cases that he believes the police should have counted as homicides. “I’m not surprised that these cases have not come to light, based on who the victims are,” he says. “However, it is a travesty that the cases are not being investigated.” (While all cases are technically ongoing until they are closed, detectives say that death investigations are much lower priorities than homicide investigations.)
As the spring of 2013 wore on, Mother Nature delivered a blessing: a deluge. That April would be the wettest on record and was relatively quiet; bad weather tends to keep criminals off the streets.
Murders began ticking up again in May. And June ended with forty-five, only three below 2012’s total. Still, when the Chicago Police Department added up the homicides for the first half of the year, they got 184—a whopping 30 percent fewer than the year-ago period. “Fewer murders than in any year since 1965,” McCarthy told reporters.
One factor, as the Tribune first noted, was that the department excluded from the count three homicides that occurred within city limits but on expressways patrolled by state police. (There would be another expressway homicide before the end of the year.) Before McCarthy’s arrival, the department did not exclude such crimes from its homicide total, according to longtime police sources.
The second half of the year, of course, includes the dog days of summer, the high-crime period that really sends sweat down the backs of police leaders. And July exploded. Over the long Independence Day weekend alone, thirteen people were killed and more than seventy were shot in Chicago. The ensuing days weren’t much better. “It’s mayhem,” declared one state lawmaker, Monique Davis, of the South Side. She called on Governor Pat Quinn to send the Illinois National Guard and the state police to Chicago to help keep the peace. B
y month’s end, the murder count had hit fifty-three, versus fifty in July 2012.
In August—typically Chicago’s hottest month—the stress inside Chicago Police Department headquarters was palpable. That’s when several police insiders first told Chicago about what they called “the panel.”
Said to be made up of a small group of very high-level officers, the panel allegedly began scrutinizing death cases in which the victims didn’t die immediately or where the circumstances that led to the deaths couldn’t be immediately determined, sources say. Panel members were looking for anything that could be delayed, keeping it off the books for a week, a month, maybe a year. “Whatever the case may be, it had to wait until it came back from the panel,” says a well-placed police insider. “All this was to hide the murder numbers, that’s all they are doing.” (How many cases did get delayed, if any, is unknown.)
By the end of August the department had counted 286 homicides since January—80 fewer than in 2012.
With the summer all but behind them, the police brass pretty much knew that, barring some extraordinary crime wave, the year’s homicide count would not eclipse 2012’s. But 2013’s total this far was still eight more than recorded during the same period in 2011. For McCarthy, beating the 2011 number was starting to look like an elusive goal.
On September 19, two gun-toting gangbangers opened fire on a crowded pickup basketball game in Cornell Park, in the Back of the Yards neighborhood. One of them used an AK-47. When the bullets stopped flying, thirteen people had been wounded, including a three-year-old boy. But no one died. A “miracle,” McCarthy said. (In the stats book, the shootings counted as only one “shooting incident” in CompStat. Read more about that in part 2 of this story.)
Two days after gunfire lit up Cornell Park, an extra-alarm fire erupted in a three-story apartment building at 112th Street and King Drive, in the Roseland neighborhood. When firefighters arrived just before two a.m., much of the building and the stairwell was engulfed in flames.
Inside, they found Millicent Brown-Johnson, twenty-eight, in a purple nightgown, her body covered in black soot, unconscious on the floor of her third-floor apartment. Her eight-year-old son, Jovan Perkins, was passed out in the stairwell, ravaged by second-and third-degree burns, according to the police report.
Ambulances rushed them to the hospital. Brown-Johnson, who had been working at the American Girl Place store on Michigan Avenue as she pursued a degree in physical therapy, did not survive. Perkins, a second grader, died later that night.
Firefighters and police immediately determined the fire to be suspicious. The next day they found a plastic gas container inside a garbage can in Palmer Park, across the street from the charred building.
On September 28, the medical examiner’s office ruled that both mother and son had died of smoke inhalation and that, based on the police and fire department investigations, their deaths were homicides.
However, the case was classified as a death investigation, not a murder investigation, and the police did not include the two deaths in their year-end homicide count. Nor have police caught the arsonist. “How will I ever get justice if the case is not even categorized the right way?” asks Austin Perkins, the boy’s father, a truck driver from Hammond, Indiana.
Excluding Brown-Johnson and Perkins from Chicago’s homicide statistics helped the September numbers clock in at forty-two rather than forty-four. At this point, the 2011 numbers were actually beginning to look beatable. Through the first nine months of 2013, the department’s murder tally was 322, versus 317 for the same period two years before.
The breakthrough happened in October. On the last day of the month, the 2013 year-to-date total was 352, versus 353 in 2011, by the department’s count. McCarthy had edged out 2011 by just one number.
October 31 also marked Superintendent McCarthy’s annual budget hearing before the Chicago City Council. He positioned himself in front of three giant charts: a set of blue bars illustrating how murders had dropped 20 percent over the past ten months; a fever line plunging toward “40-year lows” in index crimes, particularly murders; and another blue bar chart highlighting a 15 percent drop in overall crime for 2013, again labeled the “lowest level in 40 years.”
Aldermen, some wearing Halloween costumes, gave these numbers about as much scrutiny as they had the epically disastrous parking-meter deal. The daylong session was essentially a love fest. “You’ve done excellent work, and those charts say it all,” cheered Ariel Reboyras, alderman of the Thirtieth Ward, on the city’s Northwest Side. “I say, numbers don’t lie.”
Latasha Thomas, of the Seventeenth Ward, which includes high-crime Englewood on the South Side, encouraged McCarthy to dial up the good news. “I just think your PR needs to be a lot better,” she said. “We need to be shouting about what you are doing and not just throwing up these stats.”
“No doubt about it,” McCarthy replied.
But it wasn’t until the end of November that police leaders could breathe more easily. The official year-to-date homicide count was now 376. With just one month of 2013 remaining, it now seemed a safe bet that the total wouldn’t top 2011’s count of 435.
But why settle there? According to police insiders, McCarthy and his deputies now hungered to reach a new goal: to keep 2013’s number of homicides below 400, the lowest level since before Americans first landed on the moon. “They wanted to really have the big headline,” says a detective. Every homicide mattered. Including Patrick Walker’s.
Just after five a.m. on November 29, the day after Thanksgiving, a 2012 Chevy sedan with four men inside sped along a residential street in the Pill Hill neighborhood on the city’s Far South Side. Driving conditions were good: clear, no ice, no snow. Yet the car suddenly veered off the road near the intersection of Ninety-Third and Constance, sliding into the opposite lane, clipping a parked vehicle, sailing over the curb, and bashing into a light pole. It stopped only after hitting a tree.
When police got to the car, they found that the three passengers had suffered only minor injuries. However, the driver, a twenty-two-year-old named Patrick Walker, was unresponsive, according to the police report. Officers assumed that he had suffered serious head trauma in the accident. An early case report from the medical examiner’s office said that “brain matter” was found on the steering wheel.
The young man was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where he died two hours later. Police told the Tribune that “alcohol was suspected as a factor in the crash.”
Later that day, however, an autopsy showed that Walker had not died from the accident. He had been killed by a single gunshot to his right temple.
Interestingly, the Sun-Times had already reported that police found one of Walker’s passengers, Ivery Isom, twenty-two, with a loaded Glock 9 mm and a twenty-round ammunition clip at the accident scene. Police also found a bullet shell in the back seat, according to the police report. (Isom was charged with two counts of aggravated unlawful use of a weapon. He pled not guilty; at press time, his next court appearance was scheduled for April 28.)
On November 30, a pathologist deferred the cause and manner of Walker’s death “pending police investigation.” That means the autopsy is inconclusive until the police further investigate the circumstances of his death.
Walker’s death certificate, filed with the Cook County clerk’s office, says that he was murdered. No one disputes that he died from a bullet in his brain. But at press time—four months after the shooting—the public record shows Walker’s case inexplicably classified not as a homicide but as a death investigation.
That means, according to the department’s own records, Walker’s killing is not included in the city’s 2013 homicide total.
In mid-December, McCarthy and Emanuel called a news conference to highlight the release of a report from a professor at Yale University. It had found that Chicago was on track to have its lowest homicide rate since 1967 and its lowest violent-crime rate for nearly as long. “This is not jus
t 2013 against 2012,” Emanuel told the Sun-Times. “This is 2013 against the last 40 years. That is what is significant.”
Standing in front of a poster-size map showing the drops in overall crime in all of the city’s twenty-two police districts, the mayor and the superintendent then took questions.
“Have you changed the way you measure statistics?” one reporter asked.
“I don’t buy the premise of the question,” Emanuel answered and quickly moved on.
The reporter persisted: “Has the police department changed the way they measure it?”
“The answer is no,” McCarthy jumped in. “There’s something called a Uniform Crime Report, which is the national standard by which we record crime. So that’s the answer, no.”
Well … not exactly. Two weeks earlier, in fact, various media outlets had reported details of an odd change in how Chicago’s police department was counting “delayed homicides”—those in which there is a time lag between injury and death. “To meet federal and state guidelines,” the Sun-Times said, police reviewed all murders in 2013 and 2012. “Under those guidelines, a murder should be classified in the year the person was injured, and not in the year the person died.”
Huh? There were never any changes to federal guidelines, a FBI spokesman told Chicago. The standards of the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting program make it crystal clear that a homicide should be reported in the year of the victim’s death.
Next we called the Illinois Uniform Crime Report—a one-person office within the state police department that collects statistics from law enforcement agencies in Illinois—to check whether the state rule on delayed homicides had changed in 2013. The staffer told us that it hadn’t; that delayed homicides in Illinois have always been counted in the year of injury.
Confused? So were we. So we e-mailed Adam Collins, the director of news affairs for the Chicago Police Department. He e-mailed back: “In late 2013 … CPD began working to bring the city into stricter adherence with federal reporting standards. The Unified Crime Reporting System dictates each agency follow their state reporting procedures for federal reporting. According to Illinois reporting procedures, murders where the injury and death occurred in different years are to be tracked to the year of the incident, and CPD had for years been including these incidents in the wrong year.”
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