At Hot Nails Tender Care in Palatine, manicurist Carol Shier has a new accessory to offer customers. Among the lipsticks and nail kits on display are several personal protection alarms. They should be good sellers, Shier said, interrupting a customer’s nail-filing to demonstrate the shrieking alarm.
Last year, Hot Nails started locking its doors at nightfall. Now owner Sandy Carr is planning a customer safety seminar with tips from the police. She’ll use the seminar to hawk the alarms, but her best-selling point is outside Hot Nails, just down the street. It is the vacant building that housed the Brown’s Chicken & Pasta restaurant where seven people were shot to death on Jan. 8, 1993.
“It was too close to home,” Carr said, explaining her shop’s heightened interest in security. “It’s scarred everyone.”
A year after the grisly, unsolved murders at Brown’s shocked the nation, conflicting sentiments run through Palatine.
A sense of perspective has returned. The topic has faded from most conversations on the street, and worried parents no longer unexpectedly visit St. Thomas of Villanova School to make sure the doors are locked properly.
But a lingering unease has also settled on the town. Less powerful than panic, it’s the kind of crime-wariness that Chicagoans might consider healthy. Yet for many residents who had clung to the belief that Palatine was immune to the horrors of big-city violence, the restaurant massacre shattered their suburban-bred complacency.
More people double-lock their doors in Palatine now. Insurance agent Dave Mahoney won’t let his wife work alone at their office after dark anymore. And the police find residents more interested in crime prevention seminars.
“People feel violated,” said resident Gary Skoien, who has talked to many neighbors during his current congressional campaign. “The whole town feels violated. It’s analogous to having your house broken into.”
The last year has been the most wrenching for the families of the victims, left to cope with the pain and wonder, without suspects in custody, what really happened. Investigators theorize that five employees and the married couple who ran the restaurant were rounded up after closing time and shot to death during an apparent robbery.
“I just picture him being really, really scared and begging them not to hurt him,” said Diane Clayton, mother of victim Marcus Nellsen.
Before the attack, of course, there was no reason for Palatine, population 42,000, to feel totally insulated.
The village long ago outgrew its small-town heritage and joined the congested, chaotic tapestry of modern suburbia, with its busy shopping strips, apartment and condo complexes and growing social problems.
In Palatine, as in other suburbs, home burglaries are commonplace. There are drug and gang problems. Supermarket and bank hold-ups happen. So, occasionally, does murder.
But the horrific scope of the Brown’s crime-and the fact that the assailant or assailants have not yet been caught-were a powerful blow to Palatine’s self-image.
With the investigation continuing a year later, police still don’t know what happened. But some time after closing at 9 p.m., Friday, Jan. 8, the seven were slain, their bodies found at about 2:30 a.m. Saturday. While police have no motive, money was taken.
Killed were Brown’s owners, Richard E. and Lynn W. Ehlenfeldt, 50 and 49, respectively, of Arlington Heights. Also slain were five employees: Guadalupe Maldonado, 46, of Palatine, the cook; Michael C. Castro, 16, and Rico L. Solis, 17, both Palatine High School students; and Palatine residents Thomas Mennes, 32, and Nellsen, 31.
In the days after the murders, “tremendous fear” gripped Palatine, said Deputy Police Chief Walt Gasior. With police releasing little information about the case, some people in Palatine said they were afraid to take out the garbage after dark.
To address the community’s apprehension, police quickly organized several crime prevention forums for business owners and managers as well as high school students, particularly those who work in businesses after school.
“Our message was that the police plan to be here long after this terrible crime is a dim memory,” Gasior said. “That message came through, and people felt comfortable once we reconnected the strong ties that exist between the department and the community.”
In fact, Gasior said, residents were calmed so quickly that a police forum for high school parents a week after the murder drew only 20 people, instead of the expected big crowd.
Since then, fear that the Brown’s incident could be replayed has been replaced by the heightened caution that many people display today. Brad Grossman, the Police Department’s crime prevention officer, sees it in the suddenly more cooperative attitude of residents, who say they’re more watchful of suspcious activities and more willing to notify police of what they might see.
Grossman said he’s also noticed much larger crowds at the crime prevention seminars he holds. But he can’t entirely attribute his new popularity to Brown’s because people no longer talk about the incident, except to inquire idly whether there are any new leads in the investigation.
“In spite of how horrible this situation was, there has been a positive side,” he said. “Now people are much more receptive to hearing what we have to say” about crime prevention.
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Another outcome of the Brown’s massacre that some might consider positive is Palatine Mayor Rita Mullins’ emergence as a national spokeswoman on handgun control issues.
Several months before the murders, Mullins was appointed to the police policy board of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. After Brown’s, with her profile on the rise, Mullins became a leader of the conference’s movement to address crime problems through gun control and judicial restructuring. She now regularly lobbies in Washington and has met with President Clinton.
“Brown’s told us all that . . . if it could happen in Palatine, the town where our motto is `A real hometown’ and our slogan is `We grow great kids,’ then it could happen anywhere in the United States,” she said.
Despite the attention Brown’s brought to her, Mullins said she is reluctant to make the incident her political calling card, rarely mentioning it because she believes it was a random incident and she doesn’t want to further taint Palatine’s image.
“It happened,” she said. “Everyone would feel much better if the perpetrators were caught. That’s a given. But life goes on.”
To Mullins and many other residents, the empty Brown’s building, which sits at one of the busiest intersections in town, is a haunting reminder of the crime.
With neither Brown’s nor the Ehlenfeldts’ survivors interested in continuing at the site, the building, owned by another Brown’s franchisee, is available for rent or sale. Mullins said she has exerted no pressure on the owner, John Gregornick, to raze the structure, but she hopes any new tenant would replace it.
“Pretty much everyone agrees they should level it,” said Penny Phillips, a waitress at the popular Palatine Inn diner, across the street from Brown’s. “Most people say that if it did open up, they wouldn’t go there. Too many bad memories.”
Over lunch at the diner, area resident Jim Whitworth said: “I can never drive by without having a real heartbreaking feeling for the loss of youth.”
The pain, of course, is infinitely greater for the families and friends of the victims.
Emmanuel Castro, Mike’s father, lives only blocks from the restaurant, but he and his family avoid driving by it.
“It’s very painful,” he said. “We’re trying to forget.”
Evelyn Urgena, Rico Solis’ mother, moved from Arlington Heights to Chicago last year, but she kept a cabinet full of her son’s possessions, including his favorite music tapes. Rico’s sisters frequently play his favorite song, “Friday, I’m in Love,” by the Cure, and cry.
“We pray the rosary and then I talk to him,” she said. “I tell him take care of yourself. Mommy misses you. Remember, Mommy will always love you. I feel at peace.”
Mike Castro’s best friend, 14-year-old Mike Bruning, also struggles to reconcile his feelings. In the Palatine neighborhood where the two boys grew up together, the Castro family has placed a tree and memorial plaque in a local park. Bruning stops by the tree every few days to speak to Mike and share his problems. Mike could always solve his problems, he said.
“It still hurts, but the pain won’t ever go away,” the friend said. “It just decreases a little bit.”