The death of Jessica Mejia, 20, in an early morning car crash on Dec. 31, 2009 caused her family “horrible pain and loss — but that wasn’t the only horrible thing that happened,” Don Perry said Tuesday in his opening statement on behalf of her family at the Circuit Court of Cook County in Chicago.
Two sheriff’s department employees moved Mejia’s “fully clothed body” onto a bag “on the side of a snowy, wet road,” then violated their department’s protocol when they removed her clothes, exposing her underwear and breasts, and took multiple photographs of her partially nude body, Perry, the family’s attorney, said.
The lawsuit is based on a complaint filed in 2010 by Mejia’s mother, Christina Mejia, and other relatives, alleging that the sheriff’s employees intentionally caused the family emotional distress. Circuit Judge Thomas J. Lipscomb impaneled a jury of mostly women Tuesday morning.
The complaint states that after the defendants placed Mejia on a tarp, they “proceeded to remove her clothing, pull down her blue jeans and pull up her blouse and bra, thereby exposing her bare breasts, stomach, back, underwear, and buttocks in full and plain view of the public and passersby.”
The pain the Mejia family “endured these last five years is not only in their heart, but in their community,” Perry said, suggesting that the sheriff’s employees’ decision to remove Mejia’s clothes by the street in front of multiple people contributed to the perception that Mejia was naked when she died.
Christina Mejia previously said that she filed the lawsuit to clear her daughter’s name. She said many people in the south suburbs “think my daughter died from having sex, not from somebody being drunk and killing her. Because they took these photos, by the time everybody else got to the scene, all the ambulances and everybody else, she was partially naked because they made her naked.”
Mejia died while riding in a Mercedes driven by her ex-boyfriend, who was drunk when he crashed into a pole. The car rolled over in a ditch near 147th Street and Oak Park Avenue in unincorporated Cook County.
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Christina Mejia said the rumors she wanted to clear were specifically that her daughter caused the accident by straddling her ex-boyfriend, Nicholas Sord, who is now serving a 56-month prison sentence. At the time of the accident Sord had a blood alcohol limit of 0.236, approximately three times the legal limit.
Defense attorneys for the sheriff’s office, who requested a strict gag order on the case that Lipscomb granted, acknowledged the “pain and suffering the family had to endure was tragic,” but argued the officers were not liable for contributing to that pain while merely following standard protocol that they argue helped them secure Sord’s conviction.
“They had a job to do,” said Assistant State’s Attorney Andrea Huff, acting as civil defense counsel for the sheriff’s department. “Nobody was allowed near the vehicle where Jessica Mejia’s body was.”
She said the sheriff’s employees “had to examine for hair, for blood, for airbags — that’s consistent with sheriff’s protocol.”
Huff added that of the more than 200 photographs sheriff’s personnel took on the scene, “only 15” were of Mejia and “just four of those 15” were potentially compromising.
When Mejia’s family filed the lawsuit in 2010, the sheriff’s office denied taking naked photos of her.
Jurors also heard Tuesday afternoon from the plaintiff’s first witness — the sheriff’s spokesman at the time, Steve Patterson, who said the department released a statement to the public shortly after the crash.
Patterson testified that the statement denied Mejia’s body had been “grossly mishandled” on the basis that, as he quoted from the statement, “multiple independent witnesses would have prevented that from happening,” a point Perry used to suggest Mejia’s body could have easily been seen by numerous people walking around on the scene.
Patterson also testified that the press release came after he first learned of the Mejia family’s complaint on Jan. 1, 2010 — the day after the incident — from a male reporter who “couched it in a way that there were perhaps prurient interests” in taking the photos on the part of sheriff’s employees. Patterson testified that Cook County Sheriff’s Commander Brian White told him “there are so many people on a crime scene that that couldn’t happen.” It is unknown whether White was on the scene of the accident that killed Mejia.
Christina Mejia has described her daughter as an outgoing woman who would make friends with everyone. She was a junior in psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago at the time of her death.
The trial is scheduled to continue Wednesday morning.
Tara Kadioglu is a freelance reporter