A boy falsely accused in one of Chicago’s most infamous murder cases faces charges eight years later in connection with a Calumet Park shooting that has left a man critically wounded.
Romarr Gipson was 7 when he and an 8-year-old boy became the youngest people ever charged with murder in the August 1998 slaying of Ryan Harris, an 11-year-old girl found raped and suffocated in the Englewood neighborhood.
The boys were exonerated one month later when sperm found at the scene ruled out boys so young. Outrage over the crime and the accusations roiled Chicago and rippled across the nation.
On Saturday, Gipson, 15, and his stepbrother Roman Foreman, 18, were charged with two counts of aggravated battery with a firearm in connection with the Wednesday shooting of two Chicago men who were sitting in a parked car at a Calumet Park gas station. Gipson is being charged as an adult in the shootings.
Calumet Park Police Cmdr. Mel Davis said Gipson and Foreman were caught on surveillance videotape shooting the men.
The man who was critically injured remained on a breathing machine Saturday in St. Francis Hospital and Health Center in Blue Island, Davis said. The other man, who was shot in the leg, has been treated and released. Davis described both victims only as young men in their late teens.
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Davis would not say where Gipson and Foreman, both of Chicago, were arrested, but he said that Calumet Park police brought them in for questioning about 2 a.m. Thursday and Gipson was questioned for about two hours with his mother present. As of Saturday afternoon, Gipson had made no statements of guilt, Davis said.
Gipson was being held Saturday in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center; Foreman was in custody in Calumet Park.
Davis said both teens knew the victims. “The whole case seems to revolve around something that happened several years ago in Chicago with a female,” he said.
Gipson’s exoneration in the Ryan Harris murder eight years ago was only the beginning of a long series of encounters with the legal system. In 1999, a civil suit was filed on his behalf against the city, and litigation dragged on for five years.
Family members also sought psychological help for the boy and themselves, and Gipson underwent treatment for separation anxiety disorder, depression, sleep difficulties, self-hatred and over-dependency on his parents, according to the lawsuit.
In 2004, Gipson’s family settled with the city for $2 million, but not before the then 14-year-old ran into trouble when he was charged as a juvenile in the accidental shooting of a 15-year-old friend. He was placed on electronic home monitoring in September 2004.
The family of the other boy exonerated in the Ryan Harris case also sued, and his civil case went to trial in 2005 before the parties reached a $6.2 million settlement. Floyd Durr, a 37-year-old convicted sex offender, pleaded guilty to Harris’ murder earlier this year and was sentenced to life in prison.
After Gipson’s case against the city was settled, his mother said that the family considered moving to the South to be closer to relatives and that he still lived with the trauma of being accused of murder.
“Authority figures make him nervous,” she said in a 2004 interview. “He’s like a nervous little kid all the time, like, `What’s going to happen to me next?”‘
Gipson still suffers from a host of psychological issues and is enrolled in private therapeutic-based school, said Jan Susler of the People’s Law Office, which represented him in his civil suit against the city.
“This child never got a fair chance,” Susler said, adding that the stigma, shame and blame surrounding the false arrest haunt him to this day. “In the computer, every time they pick up this child for sneezing it will always say this child was picked up for this awful, awful crime. It doesn’t say that the city paid $2 million to this little boy for the horrors they visited on his life.”
Susler criticized the police for holding a news conference about the case before charges were filed.
“How many young African-American men do the police pick up every day accused of similar offenses? Why they have to have a press conference is something I don’t understand,” she said. “They continue to try to destroy this child’s life.”
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