Divers scoured the bottom of the Fox River in Carpentersville for 12 hours Tuesday but failed to find the gun used in the 1993 Brown’s Chicken slayings.
About two dozen professional divers and support personnel worked at the scene, probing the murky river bottom with metal detectors, sonar and other high-tech equipment. The search team focused on an area about 100 by 200 feet, north of the Carpentersville Dam, wading into water between 2 and 6 feet deep.
The team left the scene about 6:30 p.m. and had no plans to continue the search, Palatine Police Cmdr. James Haider said.
The divers’ inability to find the gun “either means it moved or it’s not there,” Haider said. “I wouldn’t consider it a setback.”
James Degorski and Juan Luna, former classmates at Fremd High School in Palatine, were charged May 18 with seven counts of first-degree murder in the killing of five employees and the two owners of Brown’s Chicken & Pasta in Palatine. Both men are being held without bond.
Cook County prosecutors said the men told two women about the killings in 1993 and that DNA links Luna to the crime scene. The suspects told both women they had thrown the gun into the river, according to court documents.
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Police had hoped to recover a .38-caliber handgun, which would be consistent with the bullets fired at Brown’s and witness’ descriptions of a gun allegedly owned by Degorski. Haider said police also hoped to read the serial numbers on the weapon and, depending on its condition, ask firearms examiners to try to match the weapon to the bullets recovered from Brown’s.
“From a police perspective we consider all evidence important, but this will be nice to have,” Haider said earlier Tuesday.
Haider said Degorski led police to the spot after his arrest and told them that he had disposed of the weapon there. A former girlfriend of Degorski’s, whom police wouldn’t name, was with him when he threw the gun and confirmed the location, according to Haider–a detail not found in prosecutors’ filings in courts in Illinois and Indiana at the time of the arrests this month.
Haider said Degorski disposed of the gun a day or so after the killings, throwing it from a ledge overlooking the river.
Prosecutors have said that Eileen Bakalla, a friend of Degorski’s, was with him on the day after the killings, when she accompanied him on a trip to clean out Luna’s car. But Bakalla’s lawyer, James Shapiro of Chicago, said Tuesday that Bakalla wasn’t with Degorski when he threw the gun.
Police began the search about 6:30 a.m., with a team led by divers from the Aquatics Underwater Recovery and Rescue Team in Crown Point, Ind., Haider said. The private company consists of divers from the Lake County Sheriff’s Department in Indiana and other professional divers, said a sheriff’s spokesman. Palatine Fire Department divers assisted.
The search team began by throwing a test gun into the water and watching where it settled. Earlier, police had consulted a hydrologist, who told them the gun probably would not have traveled far in the river, given its weight and the strength of the current, Haider said.
The team searched about 200 feet upriver from the Carpentersville Dam, putting three divers in the river at one time and using ropes to search in a grid pattern along the river bottom. Divers tethered to team members near shore used underwater metal detectors, sifters, sonar equipment and video and still cameras to probe the shallow water, disappearing for minutes at a time.
Visibility in water was about 1 foot, and at times iron ore in the water set off the metal detectors, Haider said.
Divers found cans, fishing tackle and other debris, police said. Team members threw the test gun several times over the course of the afternoon, charting its course and renewing their search.
If divers were to find the gun, they would transfer it to a container filled with river water, rather than expose it to the air, which would trigger more rusting and corrosion, Haider said.
In some cases, police are able to match bullets to the gun that fired them by comparing tiny scratches found on the bullets to markings inside the barrel of the gun or with other bullets fired from the gun. But some ballistics experts doubted that such precise matching could be done with a weapon that had been underwater for nine years.