UPDATED - Jan 15, 2013 - follows the original post
It's time to pay Christina Eilman and her family for what city did to her
Police released the disturbed woman into a dangerous neighborhood, where she was attacked and thrown out a 7th-floor window
John Kass - columnist | Chicago Tribune | April 27, 2012
The beast Marvin Powell is out of prison, released the other day on parole after serving six years for what he did to Christina Eilman.
He's a gang-banger, 6 feet tall, about 200 pounds, arms covered with tattoos. Some tats are memorials to dead comrades, but who they are and how they fell doesn't matter.
It's what happened to Eilman, the young woman suffering from bipolar disorder, that matters. And what is on his left arm also matters.
One tattoo says "Lord have mercy on my soul." And the other says "Pay me."
Pay me.
That's what Chicago taxpayers are going to do. They're going to pay. They won't pay Powell. He's already paid some of what he owes, doing time for kidnapping and confining her in an abandoned apartment in a South Side housing project where she was sexually assaulted.
And then she either jumped or was pushed from the seventh floor. She can't tell us, because she suffered irreparable brain damage from the fall.
If that tattoo about his soul means anything to Powell, then he'll have to wait until he's dead to pay the rest of what he owes. But the taxpayers will have to pay for what the Chicago police did to Eilman — releasing a mentally ill woman into a crime-ridden area where she was vulnerable to attack. And what Mayor Richard Daley's administration did later is also outrageous, dragging this case out year after year after year, as her family struggled to care for her.
I'm told the price tag could possibly be as high as $80 million, a wild sum until you consider what was done to her, by the thugs and the police and City Hall.
So now Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration has to clean up another Daley mess. And that's not the only one that Daley's law department left behind.
There are other cases pending that could cost additional millions, like the one involving the cop who mercilessly beat up the bartender, yet another case stalled by Daley's City Hall. But the Eilman case looms largest.
"There's no question that this case has been kicked down the road," a city official told me Thursday. "And there's no question the outcome was tragic. And if you're trying to outline a made-for-TV movie, or novel, it plays all the cards, race and sexual violence, brutality and so on. We understand that. But we have to protect the taxpayers.
"We're trying more cases. But we've inherited a backlog," said the official. "These are ugly cases from an exposure standpoint. And the politics are ugly. But we'll try this one if we have to."
Whether this case is settled or not won't be determined for some time. What was determined Thursday, however, is how the police treated her.
"They might as well have released her into the lion's den at the Brookfield Zoo," wrote the United States 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion allowing the case to go to civil trial.
What happened to her has already been revealed by the dogged reporting of the Tribune's David Heinzmann. He's been on this relentlessly since it began in 2006, and many of the details he found were reflected in the federal appellate opinion.
{photo: Christina Eilman and family}
Eilman had made a scene at Midway Airport and was taken into police custody, where she screamed "take me to the hospital" and later kicked at the bars of her cell and exhibited other bizarre behavior.
She spent 29 hours in custody, ending up in the lockup at 51st and Wentworth. Her father called from California, trying to tell police that his daughter was mentally ill. Officials blew it off.
Then they did something unconscionable. They let her go, out into the South Side a few blocks from the notorious housing project known as Robert Taylor Homes.
The justices noted that she would have stood out as a stranger, as a potential victim in the wrong place. A white girl, a California blond in a midriff top, tight white shorts and boots, was let loose in no condition to take care of herself in a black neighborhood that was one of the roughest in the city.
Careful readers know I avoid mentioning the race of people in my columns unless it's relevant. And it's only relevant here because the justices cited it as a reason why she would have been vulnerable — in the same way a judge noted during oral arguments that it would have been like dropping off a black man into the middle of a Ku Klux Klan rally.
The way she was dressed, the way she looked, the color of her skin, all of it made her stand out in a violent neighborhood, and the police should have realized this, the justices said.
"They did not warn Eilman about the neighborhood's dangers," the justices wrote. "They did not walk her to the nearest CTA station, from which she could have reached a safer neighborhood in minutes. They did not drive her back to the airport where she could have used her ticket to return to California. They did not put Eilman in contact with her mother, who had called the stationhouse repeatedly."
Once released, she walked a few blocks, then was coaxed into the building. Some folks tried to help her but didn't help enough. She was taken up to the seventh floor. Then she was set upon.
Those were the acts of criminals. They come in all colors and sizes. They prey upon the weak.
But City Hall also preyed on the weak, by dragging this on and on, stalling, year after year after year, preying upon Eilman and her family.
That's over. Now it's time to pay.
jskass@tribune.com
Copyright © 2012, Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ct-met-kass-0427-20120427,0,7495169.column
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TUESDAY, JANUARY 15, 2013
City of Chicago settlement $22.5 Million of bipolar woman police released in high crime area | Jan 15, 2013
Nearly seven years after Christina Eilman wandered out of a South Side police station and into a catastrophe, her tragic entanglement with the Chicago Police Department began to come to an end Monday — with a proposed $22.5 million legal settlement that may be the largest the city ever offered to a single victim of police misconduct.
Though the settlement is a staggering sum on its own, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration has placed a second eight-figure police settlement on Tuesday's City Council Finance Committee agenda. A $10.2 million settlement is proposed for one of the victims of notorious former police Cmdr. Jon Burge, bringing to nearly $33 million the amount aldermen could vote to pay victims of police misconduct in a single day.
The latest Burge settlement would be for Alton Logan, who spent 26 years in prison for a murder he did not commit and who alleged in a federal lawsuit that Burge's team of detectives covered up evidence that would have exonerated him — a departure from previous cases that documented torture used by Burge's team to extract false confessions. The Logan case would bring the tab on Burge cases to nearly $60 million when legal fees are counted. Burge is serving 41/2 years in federal prison for lying about the torture and abuse of suspects.
The settlement in the Eilman case would avert a trial detailing the events of May 2006, when the then-21-year-old California woman was arrested at Midway Airport in the midst of a bipolar breakdown. She was held overnight and then released at sundown the next day without assistance several miles away in one of the city's highest-crime neighborhoods.
Alone and bewildered by her surroundings, the former UCLA student was abducted and sexually assaulted before plummeting from a seventh-floor window. She survived but suffered a severe and permanent brain injury, a shattered pelvis, and numerous other broken bones and injuries.
Her lawyer and family declined to comment Monday. The case, which has dragged in the courts for six years, was set to begin trial next week. Pretrial litigation had produced scathing rebukes from federal judges of the city's behavior toward Eilman — both on the street and in court.
The city's argument that it was not responsible for her injuries because she was assaulted by a gang member was blasted in a ruling from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this year. a ruling from the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals this year. Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook described the Police Department's release of Eilman, who is white, into a high-crime, predominantly African-American neighborhood by saying officers "might as well have released her into the lion's den at the Brookfield Zoo."
While Emanuel's Law Department endured some criticism for delays in the Eilman case since the mayor took office in 2011, he has noted repeatedly that the police misconduct highlighted in these and many other cases are legacies from the Richard M. Daley administration that he — and taxpayers — are stuck with.
The mayor's office referred calls to the city Law Department, but a spokesman there declined to comment.
If approved, the Eilman settlement would surpass the $18 million settlement paid to the family of LaTanya Haggerty, who was mistakenly shot and killed by police in 1999. It is frequently referred to as the city's biggest single-victim settlement.
Ald. Howard Brookins Jr., 21st, said city officials have not taken a hard enough line against police misconduct for years, and now taxpayers are footing the bill.
"We've known this was going to bust our budget, and here we are," Brookins said. "The administration (under Daley) should have made police conduct and behavior a higher priority. They didn't, and now we're seeing these costly settlements over and over, to pay for officers mistreating people."
The Logan case was set to go to trial last month, but on the first day of jury selection, city lawyers decided to settle the case. Logan's attorney Jon Loevy said the settlement includes about $1.5 million in legal fees.
Logan sat in prison for 26 years until a stunning 2008 revelation after another man, convicted murderer Andrew Wilson, died. Wilson had told his attorneys in 1982 that he committed the murder in which Logan was accused, but the lawyers said the attorney-client privilege kept them from going public with the admission until after Wilson's death.
Although relieved the city settled the case instead of battling on, Loevy said his client would gladly give up the $8.7 million to have nearly three decades of his life back.
"I don't know who would take that much money to lose their 20s, 30s and 40s," Loevy said. "From his perspective, no amount of money can make him whole and he'd rather have his life back."
While Logan lost the middle chunk of his life, Eilman dwells in a childlike mental state and feels as though she has lost the rest of her life, her family has told the Tribune.
Hobbled by a brain injury that has permanently impaired her cognitive function, she lives with her parents in suburban Sacramento. She requires constant medical treatment and therapy. Doctors have said she will not get better.
Eilman came to Chicago on May 5, 2006, at a time when her bipolar condition was worsening. When she tried to catch a return flight from Midway to California a couple of days later, she was ranting and screaming and appeared to be out of her mind.
Police officers eventually arrested her and took her to the Chicago Lawn district near Midway. Court records and depositions in the case show that officers were alarmed by Eilman's behavior.
A female sergeant called her father, Rick Paine, who told the officer Eilman had been treated for bipolar disorder the year before. One of the arresting officers testified that the watch commander ordered that Eilman be taken to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, per department protocols. But the officers never took her because they said they did not have a car, according to court records.
Instead, Eilman was transferred to the Wentworth district lockup several miles east and held overnight. Bewildered by the changing situation, Eilman's mother, Kathy Paine, began nearly hourly calls to the Wentworth district. Over nine telephone calls to the station, Kathy Paine said she was repeatedly told to call back later until an officer told her that Eilman had already been released.
Police escorted Eilman to the back door of station, and she wandered a few blocks east to a takeout restaurant, where men began to gather and talk to the petite blonde, who was dressed in a skimpy jogging suit.
Witnesses said she appeared to be disoriented and behaving erratically. A short time later she walked a few blocks to the last remaining high-rise of the Robert Taylor Homes. Eilman eventually went with a group of people to a vacant apartment on the seventh floor of the public housing project.
One resident said she repeatedly warned Eilman that she was not safe there. Several men asked Eilman to perform oral sex, but she refused, at one point saying she would jump out the window if touched, witnesses said.
Reputed gang member and convicted felon Marvin Powell eventually demanded the others leave the apartment but prevented Eilman from going with them, saying, "I'm gonna show this bitch who the real killa is," according to witnesses.
Powell was eventually convicted of abducting Eilman but not sexually assaulting her or causing her to go out the window. He served part of a 12-year sentence before being paroled last spring, while Eilman and her family were still battling the city in court.
By David Heinzmann ; Chicago Tribune reporter
January 14, 2013
Tribune reporter John Byrne contributed.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chi-emanuel-seeks-to-settle-2-cop-misconduct-cases-for-nearly-33-million-20130114,0,4742395,full.story
Copyright © 2013 Chicago Tribune Company, LLC
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