Police and child welfare officials admit to a series of missteps that left prosecutors with no choice recently but to drop charges against a group of men accused of sexually assaulting two runaway girls in North Chicago.
The trail of errors began Sept. 24 when two girls–ages 12 and 16–fled a group outing at a Waukegan movie theater when they went unsupervised to a bathroom.
Three days later, after the girls were found in a North Chicago Days Inn, police and workers from Allendale Association, the Lake Villa residential treatment center where the girls lived, failed to gather crucial physical evidence.
The case has authorities rethinking how similar cases should be handled in the future.
“I think this case has had some problems from the beginning and should have been followed up probably a little bit quicker,” said North Chicago Deputy Chief Walter Holderbaum. “Had we known things a little bit differently at the time of the call, we probably would have handled it a little bit differently too.”
State records and interviews with officials tell the story of what went wrong.
Once the girls left the theater, they made their way to a local restaurant, where they met a group of men. The girls talked to them, got in their car and traveled to an Econo Lodge on busy Green Bay Road in North Chicago.
A clerk said they stayed in a second-floor room with peeling wallpaper, overlooking the pool.
The girls were kicked out and checked into a room at a North Chicago Days Inn about 5 p.m. Sept. 27, near busy U.S. Highway 41. A man presented a Sam’s Club identification card and paid $40 to rent Room 166 “for a couple of hours,” according to a handwritten letter from a motel clerk to a public guardian investigator.
Meanwhile, Allendale officials combed the neighborhoods near the movie theater and called anyone they thought might have had contact with the girls. The calls eventually paid off with a tip that the girls were at the Days Inn.
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Allendale staffers said that when they arrived there, they saw several young men leave the room. The workers called their supervisors, who told them to call police.
A North Chicago police officer arrived at the motel just after 6 p.m., and a motel clerk later said the officer “saw the two girls in Room 166 through the window” and asked for the key.
Allendale staff members said they entered the room with police, but descriptions of the room vary starkly.
The staff said that by the time police arrived, the girls were alone in the room among used condoms, empty beer bottles, small amounts of marijuana and drug paraphernalia.
Allendale President Mary Shahbazian said it is her understanding that her staff talked with police about those items and told police that men had been there. Shahbazian said she believes her staff made it clear to police that there had been sexual activity and drug use.
“The staff shared [with police that] men were coming and leaving the room,” Shahbazian said. “That was part of the conversation to [try to] secure the videotape, to identify who was coming and going, to identify the person of age who was allowed to rent the room.”
But North Chicago police tell a different story.
“[The responding police officer] was there, and the call was simply to recover two runaway girls. He went out there, he met with [Allendale staff], and once they got in the room and the girls were there, they were turned over to them,” said Holderbaum, according to the information he was given by the officer.
“There was no indication of anything else taking place at that time, no information from the girls that they had been sexually assaulted, no information that they had been attacked or hurt in any way.”
The North Chicago officer took a copy of the Sam’s Club card and left, the motel clerk and police said.
Holderbaum said if police had suspected sexual activity, they would have taken the girls to a hospital, but he stopped short of second-guessing how his officer handled the situation.
By virtue of their ages any sexual activity with the men would have been illegal.
Back at Allendale, a nurse examined the girls, Shahbazian said, and Allendale staff members detailed what was happening in incident reports and phone calls to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
“We didn’t think initially, `OK, we need a rape kit here,'” she said.
By the time her staff thought to get a rape kit, “the girls had taken showers, the clothing had been washed. It was too late,” Shahbazian said.
In state documents the girls alleged they had sex with numerous men and with each other and used marijuana, alcohol, cocaine and were “shot up with an unknown drug.”
The day after the girls were found, an Allendale case worker called the responding North Chicago police officer and believed the case was under investigation, Shahbazian said.
“We were under the impression that this was being looked at criminally,” she said.
But, because Allendale officials called the responding officer instead of detectives, communication was stalled, Holderbaum said.
On Oct. 19, a public guardian investigator called a North Chicago police detective who said he “knew nothing about the case,” according to a public guardian conversation log. Days later, the investigator was told the police could not find the responding officer’s report.
A police detective said he was investigating on Nov. 29 but was “unable to recover any videotape from the hotel” security cameras, according to the public guardian investigator’s log. The detective still had not interviewed the girls as of Dec. 27, the log said.
A day later, the log said Holderbaum called, saying he was attempting to put together a timeline of events. He asked the investigator if a rape kit was used or evidence taken, the log said.
Arrest warrants were issued for seven men in January based on the girls’ statements to police and a photo lineup at least three months after the incident, said Lake County Assistant State’s Atty. Veronica O’Malley.
Because none of the men confessed, O’Malley turned to the girls to build a case.
Both had come to DCFS as victims of alleged abuse, state documents show.
The 12-year-old became a state ward in 2003 after her father was accused of whipping her with an extension cord, state records indicate. She lived in several foster homes and psychiatric hospitals before moving to Allendale last year, where she was given a diagnosis of post-traumatic stress and mood disorders, an attorney familiar with her case said.
The 16-year-old became a ward of the state several months after she was born with alcohol and cocaine in her blood, a court report stated. The girl was allegedly abused in some of the 11 foster homes that she was moved through, the report said.
By the time she got to Allendale last year, she had been diagnosed as bipolar and had a history of using drugs and being sexually exploited.
When it came time to prepare the girls for trial, they would not discuss the case with O’Malley. The 12-year-old said she never had sex with the men, and the 16-year-old said she told the men she was 17, O’Malley said.
Charges against six of the seven men were dropped in May, and a warrant is outstanding for the seventh.
O’Malley called the allegations tragic and the case frustrating and disappointing.
“The difficulty is when you have an outright statement by a witness who said, `He didn’t do that to me.’ I didn’t have the physical evidence to refute that,” O’Malley said. “It got to a point that I could not proceed with what I had.
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“There can’t be one person who walks away feeling good about this case.”
The incident has caused child welfare officials, juvenile attorneys and North Chicago police to revise guidelines for handling runaways who allege sexual assault.
Shahbazian said that in the future, her facility’s supervisors will seek immediate legal advice on whether rape kits should be used or clothing secured for evidence.
Cook County Public Guardian Robert Harris said his office will be more involved in offering advice to prevent runaways and proceed in investigations.
“The word runaway is such a misnomer,” Harris said. “You think about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. It means a lot more than a trip down the Mississippi River. It really is a lot more serious than that.”
Although DCFS officials declined to comment on the specifics of this case, they said it prompted them early this year to train staff at facilities across the state on how to handle allegations of sexual assault.
DCFS is instructing staff members to immediately call police, take victims to a hospital for rape kits and establish a contact person within the facility, DCFS spokesman Kendall Marlowe said.
“It reinforced the value of taking allegations of this nature very seriously and of standardizing our response throughout programs so that the immediate physical and emotional needs of the child are taken care of,” he said.
The North Chicago Police Department announced it would add two juvenile investigators and begin requiring that a commander review police reports involving juveniles.
Looking back, Holderbaum said he found the case personally frustrating.
“There are two young girls here that I’m sure are traumatized,” Holderbaum said.
“It’s an unfortunate situation, unfortunate that the investigation turned out the way it did. And maybe had things been done a little bit different, it wouldn’t have turned out the way it did. But in light of that, we are going to go ahead and move on.”
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