A few minutes before 10 AM on June 13, 1998, a sunny Saturday, Sophia Latuszkin had just started walking across Harlem Avenue at the corner of George Street in Elmwood Park when a teal pickup truck swerved toward the curb and struck her head-on. The pickup was going so fast she was thrown 143 feet. She landed in the street, her arms and legs broken, her spine dislocated.
“Then you know why we are here,” said Mieszala. At that point, he wrote, “Mr. Wilson began to shake” and went into his kitchen, “swaying while walking and using the countertop to assist and support himself.”
Wilson, a father of two whose divorce had been made final a week earlier, worked in the 25th District. Its headquarters are part of the sprawling Area Five complex at Grand and Central, a state-of-the-art facility in a high-population, high-crime part of the city that opened in 1982 to handle spillover from overcrowded districts nearby. It quickly gained a reputation: police veterans recall that many cops who considered themselves hotshots jockeyed to get jobs there. “It’s a very fast district,” says Chicago police spokesman Robert Cargie, meaning there’s a lot of action. “People who like police work and want to do police work generally gravitate to faster districts.”
Around 4:30 AM, witnesses said, an officer fired his semiautomatic pistol at a freight train car, another violation of department rules. Other officers yelled, and he put his gun away. Some partygoers started a bonfire with twigs, sticks, and a city sawhorse, and most of the cops and civilians seem to have stayed within tossing distance of the flames, though some drank in their cars. Witnesses reported seeing at least four kinds of beer consumed: Icehouse, Heineken, Miller High Life, Miller Genuine Draft. Later Cook County evidence technicians also found cans of Bud Light and Miller Lite and empty cases of Budweiser, Beck’s, and St. Pauli Girl. Intoxication on or off duty is yet another violation of department rules. A civilian who was at the party says, “They’re the police–who’s going to stop them?”
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In her interview with Putney, Hall’s wife, Athena, said, “Lenny did not make any moves on them, he was just taking it from them. I noticed his face was turning red from being choked. One of the guys, Robert L., or the other guy, pulled the antenna around his neck, and at that time they all slid off the car, Lenny fell to the ground, the guy in civilian clothes was standing over him. Lenny was being kicked on the side and his legs by Robert L. They threw him up against the car, and then tried to stick him in the car through the door. They said, ‘Just let him leave.’ That was other cops standing around. Finally Lenny was shoved into the car, they slammed the door, kicked the car, and said, ‘We’ll get you, we’ll kill you. We know who you are, we’ll kill you.’”
Later that morning other officers dropped Hall off at the hospital, where he got X-rays of his neck, head, and back and stitches in his hand. Putney’s report on his interview with Hall notes, “Hall stated that he is known to many police officers. His apartment is known. On 14 June 1998 during the evening hours, a squad car was in front of his house, flashing a spotlight on his windows.”
James Loy had just walked out of a store and was about to rejoin his wife, who was sitting in their minivan just north of where Latuszkin was crossing the street. The sound of a roaring engine made him look up, and he saw Latuszkin about five steps into the crosswalk. The wind from Wilson’s pickup as he drove past pushed Loy against his van. He guesses the pickup was going more than double the 25-mile-per-hour speed limit. “The truck did not slow down,” he wrote the next day in a statement police and prosecutors requested from some eyewitnesses. “No brake lite went on. Hit woman. She was thrown into the air.”
