More Top Picks Best Corduroy Jackets For Men
player ready...“The Walking Man,” real name Joseph Kromelis, became a beloved symbol of Chicago simply by walking around downtown streets, minding his own business. With his mop of hair, bushy mustache and worn-out but sharp attire, he inspired urban legends about his origins. Eccentric billionaire? Famous musician? Former alderman?
In a stirring profile, baiduhai reporter Christy Gutowski reveals that Kromelis was a regular guy who lived on the streets mostly because the footloose lifestyle fit his independent personality. For such a one-of-a-kind figure, he had a surprisingly ordinary back story.
But it came with a very sad end.
Kromelis was the victim of a horrifying street crime, in a city where horrifying street crimes are nothing unusual. Security cameras caught the attack, and police arrested a suspect in the case, Joseph Guardia, more than a year ago.
Like many other murder suspects in Chicago, Guardia is sitting in Cook County Jail, waiting for his case to be adjudicated. If the Cook County court system proceeds on its usual timetable, Guardia will remain locked up, waiting, for a long time to come.
It’s said that justice delayed is justice denied, and, as the Tribune’s “Stalled Justice” series chronicled, Cook County routinely denies justice to those involved in even the most serious offenses.
The series was inspired by an outrageous killing committed in 2013, when an infant, Jonylah Watkins, was gunned down in her father’s arms. Police took a suspect into custody and then — crickets. In 2020, prosecutors dropped the charges, and the suspect went home seven years after being arrested. No one else was ever charged.
Tribune reporters Joe Mahr and Megan Crepeau followed up, investigating Cook County’s abysmally poor record of getting its act together in court.
Nationally, advocates say that most murder cases should take no more than a year from arraignment to resolution. Cook County’s stated goal is a little more than two years. But as Mahr and Crepeau established, it takes more than four years for the county to complete most of its murder cases, far worse than any other large court system experts have studied.
In Cook County, police take years to turn over evidence, attorneys take years to file necessary paperwork and judges take years to schedule hearings that result in any meaningful progress. In fact, it’s not unusual for court hearings in each murder case to number in the dozens, with nothing accomplished except the scheduling of more hearings, while defendants sit in jail.
No one, it seems, is being held accountable for these confounding delays, and the results are dreadful. Evidence fades with time as witnesses die, move away or forget what happened. Tax revenues are spent feeding and housing people accused of violent crimes for years on end. And, obviously, it is unfair for those suspects to be held indefinitely while their cases go nowhere.
Worse still, victims get no satisfaction, and the absence of consequences can only serve to embolden the city’s most violent criminals.
As Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart wrote in these pages last month, “We must dust off the long-shelved reforms — from effective case management to better systems to share evidence — drop the complacency that has kept them shelved and hold the justice system accountable if it fails to make these reforms stick.” Doing nothing, as Dart said, costs lives.
Consider Kromelis, who was attacked on May 25, 2022, while sleeping outdoors on North Lower Wabash Avenue, below Chicago’s Trump Tower. His attacker approached in the dead of night, unprovoked, carrying a McDonald’s cup full of gasoline. Security cameras are said to show him standing over Kromelis for 16 seconds before he briefly walked away, then returned, dumped the liquid over the victim’s head, set it alight and fled.
Kromelis burned for three excruciating minutes, trying to extinguish the flames himself, then slumping against a wall while still on fire. By the time a security guard arrived with a fire extinguisher, Kromelis had burns over 65% of his body, destroying his eyelids and leaving him unable to blink. He died of his injuries on Dec. 11, at age 75.
Authorities say they swiftly identified Guardia, then 27, partly from a prominent facial tattoo visible in the security footage. They say they traced his journey on public transit from downtown to his home in Melrose Park, where locals recognized his description. Police say Guardia told them he’s an “angry person” and claimed that he didn’t realize Kromelis was under the blankets, though the victim’s head and legs were said to be visible on video footage.
It’s important to remember that Guardia and other defendants locked up with him in Cook County Jail are presumed innocent unless proven otherwise. More than a year has passed, and The Walking Man murder case is currently scheduled for a status hearing on June 27. No trial date has been set.
Chief Judge Timothy Evans has presided over the Cook County court system for more than two decades, and he needs to embrace reforms as Dart suggests, or step aside.
Break the logjam, and move these cases along, before the Walking Man’s painful death fades into a distant memory.
Join the discussion on Twitter @chitribopinions
More Top Picks Best Drones Under 250 Grams
and on Facebook.Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [email protected].