Newly released Illinois State Police records show that a homeless man arrested after jumping a fence into the backyard behind Gov. JB Pritzker’s Gold Coast home on July 4 didn’t know whose property he had entered.
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State police late last week released 102 pages of heavily redacted records in response to an open-records request from the Tribune. The records largely back up what Pritzker has said publicly about the incident, which the main opponent in his bid for a third term this November, former Republican state lawmaker Darren Bailey, has used to criticize the governor’s record on criminal justice and to solicit campaign contributions.
“In this case, I’m fortunate,” Pritzker said in a response to a question about the incident at an unrelated event last month. “I do not believe — I don’t know because I wasn’t in the interrogation of this person — but I do not believe this person was targeting me.”
Dwayne Cortez Milton, 46, the man charged with trespassing at Pritzker’s Astor Street home, “landed in a very unlucky circumstance of choosing to jump a fence on my block that happened to be my fence,” Pritzker said, “and I’m sure (he was) very surprised to discover as he landed, literally having jumped the fence, that he … had a police officer on top of him at that moment.”
Pritzker’s campaign has declined to say whether he or any family members were home at the time of the incident, and the newly released records give no indication. The governor’s government press office did not immediately respond on Wednesday to a request for comment.
Shortly before 10 p.m. on July 4, a state trooper from Pritzker’s executive protection unit who was monitoring a surveillance camera saw Milton approach a gate in an alley behind the governor’s private residence, according to the state police report. After briefly disappearing from view, “suddenly Milton reappeared on camera, ran towards the gate, and jumped the fence,” the report says.
The trooper rushed to the gate, leaving behind his cellphone, radio and body-worn camera, according to the report, and found Milton caught on the top of the gate by the right leg of his pants. Milton fell to the ground, and after taking him into custody, the trooper brought him to the front of the home, flagged down a passerby and used that person’s cellphone to call 911 for backup from Chicago police, the report says.
During an interrogation after his arrest, Milton told another state trooper he didn’t have a permanent address or a cellphone, according to the report.
“Milton reiterated multiple times that he did not know anything about the residence or who lived there,” the report says, adding that Milton said he had jumped the fence to evade police and never tried to enter Pritzker’s home.
At the time of his arrest on a misdemeanor trespassing charge, authorities had already issued a warrant for Milton stemming from his failure to appear in court and alleged curfew violations in a separate retail theft case, court records show.
Milton had originally been caught shoplifting about $55 worth of merchandise from an Uptown Walgreens in late April and was released on electronic monitoring, court records show. After he missed a court date and pretrial officers alleged he’d tampered with his ankle monitor, authorities rearrested him and held him in custody for about six weeks, records show.
Cook County Judge Aleksandra Gillespie ordered him released again June 17, records show. A second pretrial monitoring report, filed June 25, said Milton had racked up a half-dozen “alerts” for violating his 8 p.m. curfew while on electronic monitoring. When he failed to appear in court June 25, Gillespie issued a warrant for his arrest — just a week before the alleged trespassing at Pritzker’s home.
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After the July 4 arrest, Cook County Judge Shauna Boliker ordered Milton to stay away from the property and have no contact with the state trooper who reported him to authorities. Milton remained in custody and pleaded guilty July 8 to the original retail theft charge. He was sentenced to a year in the Illinois Department of Corrections and is being held at Stateville Correctional Center near Joliet.
State prison records show Milton has previously served time for burglary, retail theft, drug possession, armed robbery and aggravated battery, among other convictions dating to the late 1990s.
A status hearing on Milton’s trespassing case is scheduled for Thursday morning at the branch courthouse in Chicago’s Belmont Cragin neighborhood, court records show.
In a mid-July fundraising email with the subject line “Pritzker gets a taste,” Bailey drew a line between the alleged trespassing and the Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity-Today Act, the criminal justice overhaul Pritzker signed early in his second term that included the elimination of cash bail.
“Because of Pritzker’s SAFE-T Act, this repeat offender was allowed to offend once again!” the email said.
It’s unclear, however, whether Milton would have been kept in jail while awaiting trial on his previous charge under the cash bail system that existed before the law took effect in 2023.