At the urging of Mayor Tiffany Henyard, the Village of Dolton paid a west suburban construction company — linked to multiple corruption cases — more than $200,000 in no-bid, no-contract work to replace senior homeowners’ roofs and windows.

Now, federal investigators are seeking records from Dolton officials concerning the construction project undertaken by Summit-based O.A.K.K. Construction Co., owned by Alex Nitchoff. His family ran a restaurant in town, and his father once engaged in an apparent scheme to attempt to clear hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid taxes from properties the family owned in the village.

Alex Nitchoff, O.A.K.K.’s president, is awaiting sentencing after he pleaded guilty in January to bribing a Cook County assessor’s official for property tax breaks. His late father, Boris, was implicated in a home renovation bribery scheme involving former Chicago Ald. Carrie Austin (34th). O.A.K.K. construction was subpoenaed as part of the federal investigation of Austin, the Sun-Times reported in 2019. An attorney for Alex Nitchoff declined to comment. Austin has denied any wrongdoing.

Federal subpoenas were issued this spring to the Village of Dolton and Thornton Township, where Henyard is the supervisor, and records show O.A.K.K. was named in the Dolton subpoena. They are part of an ongoing and intensifying federal investigation into Henyard, the self-styled “supermayor,” whose controversial governing style and decisions have generated national and international news coverage.

Dozens of businesses, government employees, political figures and members of Henyard’s inner-circle are named in the wide-ranging subpoenas, which also seek spending records from multiple trips, including a October 2022 trip that Henyard and supporters of her cancer nonprofit foundation took to Springfield to promote a breast cancer bill. The bill, though, had not been filed, and the State Legislature wasn’t in session, as first reported by the Illinois Answers Project and Fox 32 Chicago.

Other people or organizations named in the subpoenas include:

• Henyard’s nonprofit that claims to help cancer victims, “The Tiffany Henyard Cares Foundation,” which she financed using township money. The Illinois Attorney General’s Office is investigating the foundation, which is barred from fundraising after failing to submit required documentation.

• Jose Aldaco, a businessman from Bensenville, who billed the township $17,000 for 1,000 T-shirts and sweatshirts ahead of the journey that Henyard and members of her foundation took to Springfield. The federal subpoena asked for records related to that specific T-shirt invoice submitted by Aldaco’s company. The invoice came one day after the paperwork creating Henyard’s foundation was submitted to the state. Messages left for Aldaco were not returned.

• Kamal Woods, who is identified in divorce records as Henyard’s boyfriend, works under Henyard at the township and is a director of her foundation. Woods earns a “highly lucrative salary — in excess of $100,0000 per year” working at the township in addition to his side gig providing private security for local government, according to his divorce case. Woods hung up when reached for comment.
• Keith Freeman, the initial registered agent for Henyard’s foundation, who is also the village manager and Henyard’s paid senior advisor at the township. Freeman is charged with bankruptcy fraud after allegedly shielding income he made from the Village of Robbins, the Village of Dolton, Thornton Township and a Northfield-based company that leases vehicles to poor municipalities at high rates. Freeman has pleaded not guilty and did not return emails and phone messages seeking comment.

• Michael Kasper, the election attorney for former Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, who helped Henyard defeat a recall effort in 2022. Messages left for Kasper were not returned.

• Former Calumet City Mayor Jerry Genova, who was sentenced to five years in prison on corruption charges in 2002, worked on a campaign for Henyard’s slate of candidates in 2023. Genova said in a statement that he has worked as a marketing and economic development consultant for 30 years and that he “works for a private firm that provides consulting services to Thornton Township and other governmental and corporate clients throughout the Southland and Chicago area.”

As for the Nitchoffs, they are a longtime fixture in Dolton, having owned and operated Olivia’s Restaurant — a well known diner in town that has since been turned over to new ownership.

They are also absentee landowners. A Chicago Sun-Times investigation showed that the Nitchoffs attempted to evade several hundred thousand dollars in unpaid property taxes on Dolton properties by letting their taxes become delinquent and then rebuying the properties through shell companies for a fraction of the debt through Cook County scavenger or tax sales.

All the while, Nitchoff’s businesses were active in Dolton political affairs, contributing more than $8,600 over seven years to former Mayor Riley Rogers. In February 2022, they contributed $2,000 to Henyard’s campaign and another $5,000 four months later. The latter contribution occurred days after O.A.K.K. first billed the village for the no-bid, no-contract residential construction at several dozen homes that totaled $205,000, money that the village paid out of federal COVID-19 grant money.

Having never authorized the work, the Dolton village board initially refused to pay the bills. O.A.K.K. responded by sending letters to the senior homeowners, threatening to put liens against their homes.

“I am really confused right now,” resident Rose Rice wrote in an email to village officials. “First of all, I didn’t sign any papers or an agreement with this company, so why is this lien against my property and why is my name on this document … This is asinine.”

John Bodendorfer, O.A.K.K.’s construction manager, apologized during a December 2022 village board meeting and said the letters should have been mailed to the mayor and village board instead. He said he was “seeking payment for the work that we completed for the homeowners.”

At the same meeting, village trustees, a majority of whom oppose Henyard, criticized the process and asked Henyard how she picked the contractor.

“If you don’t get a (bid), you get contractors who donate to her campaign fund,” said then-village trustee Edward Steave. “That’s reality. Because the mayor should not have all the power to pick the contractors, pick who she wants, and then she goes to them for campaign donations.”

Henyard said she announced at an earlier board meeting that they needed contractors to do the work and O.A.K.K. signed up.

“I don’t go pick people,” Henyard said. “People come to the village, they apply and they want to do it and they do the work. I could care less who does it as long as the resident gets the service.”

Because the cost of each job did not exceed $5,000, Henyard said the village was not required to seek other proposals to comply with the requirements of the federal grant money the village used to pay for the project.

“I’m asking again for the board to make them whole, pay them what’s owed to them so they can complete the process …” Henyard said.

After Village Trustee Jason House asked for a copy of O.A.K.K.’s contract and its customers, Henyard made it clear that none existed: “For the record there is no contract. No one has a contract.”

Bodendorfer declined to comment for this story. He pleaded not guilty to federal charges that he gave jewelry, meals, sports tickets and home improvement materials to Lavdim Memisovski, a commercial group leader at the Cook County assessor’s office, for tax breaks on the Nitchoff family properties that exceeded a half-million dollars. His boss, Alex Nitchoff, pleaded guilty to bribery charges in January.

Nitchoff’s late father, Boris, was implicated in the federal corruption case against Austin, the former alderperson, after he allegedly provided her with sump pumps and kitchen cabinets in her home as he sought business from the City of Chicago.

Records show the Village of Dolton also paid O.A.K.K. Construction $14,500 to build a fence around the property that became a publicly-owned ice rink that was used for one of Henyard’s campaign events without her campaign paying for it, in an apparent violation of state election law.

Freeman, the village manager, said at the December 2022 trustee meeting that the critics were ignorant of the federal grant reporting rules and accused them of “gaslighting.”

“It’s like you want to start a fight,” he said.

Freeman was indicted in April for bankruptcy fraud after allegedly underreporting income for multiple years in a bankruptcy filing earlier this year.

Freeman is accused of falsely reporting that his 2023 income was $99,647 when it was approximately $195,000. He also allegedly failed to report that Village of Robbins, where he formerly worked as village manager, had a claim against him because he received about $90,396 “in excess of his authorized salary.”

The indictment also alleged that a Northfield company that uses high-interest loans to sell firefighting vehicles and other municipal equipment paid him $24,500 in consulting fees from December 2021 through January 2022 — income he also did not list on his bankruptcy filing.

The subpoenas issued to Thornton Township and the Village of Dolton sought records related to First Government Lease, of Northfield, and its president Paul Graver. Records show that the Securities and Exchange Commission fined Graver $50,000 in 1992 after he took part in “three schemes to fraudulently induce the purchase or sale of securities.”

Records show the Village of Dolton leased a 2023 Chevrolet Tahoe from the company for five years for $149,000 in all — with nearly $56,000 of overall price tag coming from loan and interest costs.

Village Trustee Kiana Belcher, who criticized the lease agreements in a September 2023 board meeting, said that Dolton leases multiple vehicles from the company.

Graver did not return messages for comment.

Larry Hall was not even three years into his career as a Flossmoor police officer when he began having sex in the summer of 2007 with an 18-year-old woman he had met months earlier while working as a resource officer at the south suburban high school she attended.

Hall and the woman had sex in his squad car multiple times during the next two years while Hall was on duty, including once when he was notified of a car accident and had to turn on his emergency lights and drop her off to get to the scene. He lied to investigators more than a dozen times when they confronted him and was fired, according to court records.

For most officers, such an offense would end their careers. But a little more than four years later, Hall returned to law enforcement, rising to become the acting deputy chief in the nearby Village of Robbins, where he oversees internal affairs and background checks.

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Robbins Mayor Darren Bryant said that “sometimes we take what we can get” when it comes to the difficult task of hiring part-time, low-paid police officers.

“Just because you got fired doesn’t mean you can’t grow or you can’t learn from your last job,” he said. “It’s almost a restorative practice.”

Robbins has long been a dumping ground for police officers with troubled histories. In the past year alone, Robbins’ part-time police department employed Hall as well as two police officers whom the Chicago Police Department fired for lying about what they saw the night Laquan McDonald was murdered, and an officer whose history of past misconduct must be disclosed to defense attorneys any time he testifies in court. That officer was fired for submitting a vacation request containing the forged signature of his police chief.

Departments like Robbins that most often hire fired cops are at the mercy of diminished property tax bases to fund their operations. They pay just above minimum wage and hire fired cops who then use their status as police officers to secure higher-paying private security jobs or to salvage their policing careers before going elsewhere. In turn, residents are often left with a police force that gets more attention for the misdeeds of its officers and the crimes it doesn’t solve than the ones it does.

University of Chicago law professor John Rappaport, who studied the phenomenon of “wandering officers” with checkered pasts jumping to small departments in Florida, said the problem locally is consistent with his analysis.

“We found that cops who got fired tended to move to small agencies with fewer resources,” Rappaport said. “I don’t know if it’s as real as they say, but people in law enforcement say there’s a real hiring and retention crisis. You can easily imagine a situation where an under-resourced town that can only pay minimum wage has to take any licensed, warm body.”

'The worst of all worlds'

Robbins, tucked along the banks of the Little Calumet River, is a proud village with a remarkable history.

The hometown of celebrities such as hoops legend Dwayne Wade, actress Keke Palmer and Nichelle Nichols, who played the pioneering role of Uhura on the original Star Trek series, Robbins is one of the oldest majority-Black incorporated towns in America.

It is also burdened by a feeble commercial and industrial tax base, a shrinking population and an infrastructure plagued by disrepair. About 34% of the village’s 4,500 residents live in poverty, according to census estimates, and a 2021 financial report showed the village posting a $1.3 million deficit, spending about 33% more than what was collected.

Accordingly, the pay for Village of Robbins employees such as police officers lags well behind what wealthier municipalities can afford.

Former Robbins Police Commander Anthony Burnett, who resigned from the part-time department in March, said that pay for patrol officers begins at $15 per hour. This is for a village that reported 43 violent crimes in 2020, according to the most recent FBI crime statistics.

For comparison, Arlington Heights, which has more than 16 times the population of Robbins, also reported 43 violent crimes that year. At the beginning of this year, full-time pay for Arlington Heights police officers started at $80,500.

Robbins Village Board Member Tiffany Robinson, the public safety chair, said that their financial precarity extends beyond the wages. Robinson said the village is so strapped for cash that it is often unable to send police officers to the training academy, which costs $2,000 per officer for part-time training that the state reimburses. So they’ll hire officers who have already been trained from other departments.

“If you’re not generating property tax dollars and you don’t have high revenue coming in it will definitely present a problem,” Robinson said. “There's really no comparison, which is another reason why officers leave, which is the low pay.”

Burnett said their department relies on a few officers who retired from other departments, but the majority “were fired from other departments or can’t get hired by other departments.”

“It’s pretty much that Robbins is the last resort,” he said.

This combination of low-paid, part-time officers tasked with addressing significant violent crime has resulted in a chaotic, dysfunctional and scandal-prone police force.

Antonio L. Madix was hired by the department in December 2022 despite being arrested for allegedly throwing his wife to the ground and choking her five years ago. That case was eventually dismissed. He was fired in August last year after he remarried and was charged with allegedly pushing the face of that wife and shooting a gun through his car windshield and into a garage door during a domestic incident. Madix, who later pleaded guilty to criminal damage to property while the other charges were dropped, hung up when reached for comment.

Another Robbins police officer, Sharita R. Horton, resigned in April 2023 after she crashed into a house and was charged by a Cook County Sheriff’s officer that previous January with her second DUI in a dozen years, records show. She refused to take a sobriety test and claimed in a brief interview the arrest was retaliation by Robbins police. The charge was later dropped. In an unrelated court matter, she is being sued in Cook County after her pitbull allegedly bit a child’s face at her home, which she said didn’t happen.

In 2013, Robbins Police Chief Mel Davis was fired after state officials discovered that the law enforcement credentials of his hand-picked internal affairs investigator, Douglas J. Smith, were phony. Smith’s materials included a photograph of the badge that fictional character Sgt. Joe Friday used in the television show “Dragnet.” Davis’ interim replacement, Hashi Jaco, was accused of domestic battery by two ex-wives but the charges were later dropped. He later hired his third wife onto the department even after she failed to complete basic training. Jaco was later fired in January 2014.

These three men were hired to clean up the department after the Cook County Sheriff’s Office stepped in to fill a manpower shortage and found hundreds of rape kits and rape cases that were never fully investigated, including one case that implicated the grandson of the police chief, Johnny Holmes. The chief later resigned after he was charged with drunk driving twice in three years.

After the rape kits were discovered, the Cook County Sheriff’s Office offered in 2013 to take over police operations, which they provided to the poor suburb of Ford Heights at a cost of about $3.5 million annually to the county. Robbins officials declined. More recently, the sheriff’s office handled all calls for the village following a police walk out in 2021.

Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart said in an interview the unpredictability of the problems that exist in poor communities’ police departments makes them difficult to plan for, whether it’s scattershot staffing or squad cars that stop working.

“This is more your day-to-day operations where there’s faltering systems constantly,” he said. “This is really sort of the worst of all worlds when you think about it.”

'Somebody rather than nobody'

Bryant, the Robbins mayor, acknowledged the problems in the village’s police department after a video came out two years ago showing Robbins Deputy Chief Byron Redmond drinking alcohol inside his police office.

Bryant issued a statement saying he was suspending Redmond because, in the Village of Robbins, “image matters.”

Redmond was fired but then rehired as a sergeant, and he later sued Bryant and the village. The lawsuit alleged other Robbins administrators drank on the job including Bryant, who lacked the authority to fire him.

Redmond said he was rehired after enough Robbins residents complained about his firing. He noted that after he was fired, locals still called him with crime tips because he had his “ears out there.”

“Basically, I dealt with people appropriately,” he said. “I was very fair with people and that’s why they wanted me back.”

Byrant said in an interview Redmond’s allegations were false, but that he deserved a second chance, which is often the case for officers coming to Robbins.

“I’ll say this, you need someone to respond,” he said. “It’s not like we don't have anybody responding. It’s somebody rather than nobody.”

Since 2000, about 17% of all officers hired by the department  — 46 altogether  — joined or rejoined the department directly after getting fired, state data shows. By comparison, the Chicago Police Department hired or rehired just 15 officers this way. Entry-level pay for full-time Chicago police officers begins at $54,600 and jumps to $82,500 within 18 months.

Robbins is in a situation similar to the nearby impoverished “inner-ring” suburbs of Chicago such as nearby Dixmoor, Markham and Phoenix, which have hired or rehired 76 police officers directly after they were fired. But this phenomenon is not unique to Cook County.

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More than 16% of all police officers that worked in the former Southwestern Illinois town of Alorton came to the department after being fired in the past 24 years. Three years ago, Alorton merged with the two nearby municipalities to become Cahokia Heights. Nearly 60% of Alorton residents lived in poverty before the merger.

For most of these police officers, carrying a badge and a gun part-time isn’t the apex of their careers, but a resume builder for higher-paying side jobs.

One former Robbins police officer, Clifton Heard, came to the department in 2016 after the University of Illinois-Chicago Police Department fired him for an off-duty fight in the Little Italy neighborhood in 2015 where he removed his duty weapon from the waistband of his pants and handed it to another officer, his then-girlfriend, discipline records show. In a deposition filed in his wrongful termination lawsuit, Heard said he was paid twice as much in private security as he made in Robbins, where he made $10.25 per hour.

For other fired officers, Robbins is a useful reentry point before quickly moving on.

Janet Mondragon came to the Robbins Police Department about two years ago after being fired from the Chicago Police Department for lying to investigators about what she saw on Oct. 20, 2014, the night Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke shot and killed the 17-year-old McDonald, eventually leading to Van Dyke’s conviction on a second-degree murder charge.

Mondragon told investigators that while driving behind McDonald, she saw Van Dyke and former police officer Joseph Walsh and heard them order McDonald to drop his knife, which she claimed he was waving. She said that as she “looked down” to park the car, she heard shooting but “did not know who fired the shots,” and also claimed that while she and Van Dyke were colleagues, they did not socialize outside of work other than attending a Fraternal Order of Police picnic together.

Later, investigators found that Mondragon and Van Dyke were friends, they texted sometimes numerous times per day in the weeks before the shooting. Nine days before the shooting, they texted 70 times.

The Chicago Police Board fired her in July 2019 after determining that Mondragon needed only a few seconds to park, the dashcam showed that her car was moving during a portion of the shooting and the shooting lasted 15 seconds; meaning, she would have seen at least part of it. Mondragon challenged the ruling but lost twice on appeal.

About a year after Mondragon joined Robbins in 2022, the department hired her former CPD colleague, Ricardo Viramontes. Viramontes was also fired for lying about what happened during McDonald’s murder. The Chicago Police Board ruled that Viramontes lied to investigators when he said that McDonald “continued to move and attempted to get back up off the ground . . . with the knife still in his hand,” after he was shot 16 times. Viramontes resigned in January from Robbins. He did not respond to multiple messages.

Mondragon bounced around the suburbs, making a stop at the Saint Xavier University Police Department before landing at the Bridgeview Police Department, where she now works part-time. Both she and Viramontes are on the Brady List, a document that tracks officers who have been charged with crimes or accused of serious misconduct. They appear on the do-not-call portion of the list, meaning Cook County prosecutors are prohibited from calling them into court to testify due to their misdeeds.

Bridgeview Police Chief Ricardo Mancha said the department is appealing the decision to put Mondragon on the Brady List. He said he hired Mondragon, who did not respond to multiple messages, after the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board cleared her waiver to work and she proved herself while working as a Robbins police officer.

Mancha called Mondragon “a very good officer,” and said he believed she told the truth in the McDonald case.

Up until late March, Robbins police employed another officer on the Brady List: Sheldon Crawford. Unlike Mondragon, Crawford is allowed to testify in court, but prosecutors must disclose his past misconduct or lack of credibility to defense attorneys before any of his testimony.

Crawford came to the Robbins Police Department from the similarly beleaguered Dixmoor Police Department after being fired from the Markham Police Department. Crawford was found to have submitted a vacation request bearing a forged signature of his police chief.

The Robbins Police Department fired Crawford the day after Illinois Answers Project and WGN Chicago asked village officials about his position on the Brady List. In an interview, Crawford said that was "something that didn't affect my employment, something they knew when they hired me."

The student and the cop

Hall’s history as a Flossmoor police officer was well known by the time he was hired in Robbins.

News stories chronicled his downfall and his failed attempts to sue the Flossmoor police department.

The woman told investigators in August 2009 that she was a senior at Homewood-Flossmoor High School in 2007 and had just turned 18 when Hall, then 32, walked up to her at school and wished her a happy birthday.

Her family said she transferred to the school and was adjusting well with therapy after she moved out of the Chicago home she lived in with her mother, who dated a Chicago police officer who would beat them.

She said her relationship with Hall, the school resource officer, began a couple months later when she reported to him that someone keyed her car, Hall’s disciplinary records show. After she graduated in June 2007, Hall gave her his number and told her to call him and their sexual relationship began soon after.

The woman’s parents notified Flossmoor police in July 2009, saying they were concerned that Hall was “very controlling” of their daughter’s movements, that he became “verbally abusive” when he asked their daughter for money, and that he “supposedly gets angry when she goes out with friends or parties.” In an interview with investigators, the woman said that she gave Hall up to $4,000, which to this day she says he has not repaid.

Reached for comment, the woman told Illinois Answers and WGN Investigates that Hall “did take advantage of a young woman but people should be given a second chance.”

“Your past shouldn’t dictate your future,” said the woman, whom Illinois Answers is not naming given what happened to her and her age at the time. “I believe that people change.”

Confronted by his superiors, Hall lied a dozen times about having sex in his squad car and confessed only after being confronted repeatedly with witness testimony, according to his disciplinary records. 

“From the day I got hired here, I tried to be the most honest, respected person and I made some mistakes,” Hall said to investigators, before acknowledging what happened. “I know there are going to be some serious ramifications behind this, and I’d rather walk away telling the truth. I know it’s going to cost me a lot, but I have made some mistakes, and those allegations are true.”

Further investigation showed that he sent electronic messages where he referred to Flossmoor residents as “Flossmorons” and used vulgar nicknames to describe his superiors. He was fired in November 2009.

Hall, who is Black, fought the firing in federal court, claiming it was an unequal punishment compared to the discipline issued to his white colleagues. U.S. District Judge John Lee disagreed in an opinion issued in December 2012.

“There is also nothing in the record to suggest that any of them lied during a formal investigation to cover up their actions. Indeed, the department has never had another officer have sex while on duty and subsequently lie about it,” Lee wrote in his opinion.

Hall, who declined to comment, appealed the ruling and lost again in April 2013. Less than one year later, he surfaced in the Robbins police department, where he “performed his duties over the past 10 years in a spirit of excellence and with compassion for the Village of Robbins residents,” according to a village spokesman.

Lourdes Duarte, of WGN Investigates, contributed to this story

The City of Chicago has filed a lawsuit seeking more than $10 million from a north suburban woman and her real estate company in connection with a vacant-lot-turned-dumping-ground on the South Side, claiming that she is a “scourge on the city and its residents” and “the city’s worst landowner.”

The lawsuit, filed last week, targets Northbrook resident Suzie B. Wilson and her company, Regal LLC, which owes the city more than a quarter million dollars in fines and owns a West Englewood lot that for years has been a dumpsite for hundreds of decomposing rubber tires that “piled multiple feet in the air.”

The city contends Wilson’s actions are part of a broader pattern of her failure to maintain hundreds of vacant lots across the city “that plague some of the city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods” on the South and West sides.

“She does not care that she is endangering the lives of countless city residents and causing significant environmental harm. She instead seeks shelter behind her sham corporations and limited liability companies,” the lawsuit alleges.

“Wilson’s reign of terror over numerous city neighborhoods must end. Enough is enough.”

In a joint investigative series last year, the Illinois Answers Project and Block Club Chicago revealed Wilson as the manager of more than two dozen companies that owe more than $15 million in unpaid rat-related tickets the city has issued to hundreds of vacant lots her companies control.

According to the latest lawsuit, Wilson has more judgments against her businesses than anyone else that owns property in Chicago “by a magnitude of 10 or more.”

Following the series, the city began going after Wilson in separate lawsuits.

Wilson and her attorneys did not respond to messages, and Genevieve Mary Daniels, an attorney for Regal, declined to comment, citing pending litigation.

The tires on the West Englewood lot at 6722 S. Ashland Ave. were removed from the 2,650-square-foot property earlier this month, only after the city had issued several violations, sent prelitigation letters and drafted the complaint, the city alleges in the lawsuit.  Before the tires were removed, they were a breeding ground for mosquitoes, a harbor for rats and posed an environmental and fire hazard for nearby businesses and residents.

The lawsuit notes that tire fires can “burn uncontrollably and at high temperatures” due to the air trapped in tire piles, while melted rubber generates oil, meaning these fires cannot be doused with water. Tire piles also create an environmental hazard because they release methane gas when they sit in the sun.

This lawsuit marks the city’s latest effort to try to collect from the deadbeat companies that the city maintains are owned by Wilson. Last year, the city went to court and consolidated the outstanding fines owed by Wilson and the companies into 27 lawsuits, each targeting Wilson’s different companies, according to city officials.

The city’s latest legal filing alleges that Wilson has tried to defraud the city by cycling her properties through different limited liability companies with the “apparent (but incorrect) belief that this relieves her of her duty to maintain these properties, and thus ultimately relieves her of any liability for the environmentally hazardous and life-threatening conditions she creates.” 

For the West Englewood lot, Wilson acquired the property in 1995 through a tax deed sale, deeded the property to one of the businesses she manages, Random LLC, and in 2008 transferred the property to Regal, according to the lawsuit.

Days after Illinois Answers identified Wilson’s role as the managers of these companies, Regal transferred management to newly created limited liability companies based in South Dakota — a state with records laws that do not require companies to list which individuals manage the companies. 

The city’s lawsuit states that she created these companies “to better shield herself from liability,” noting that one of her South Dakota companies is called “FCOC, LLC.”

“On information or belief, the acronym ‘COC’ in ‘FCOC’ refers to the ‘City of Chicago,’ the lawsuit states.

City officials declined to speculate what the “F” stands for.

From the seat of his wheelchair, Rick Guardino has crowd surfed at Lollapalooza, cheered on his Cubs at Wrigley Field and closed down attacking lanes for his wheelchair rugby team, the Bears.

“I’m so independent, I live on my own, I do everything on my own,” Guardino said. “My mom raised an independent man that has cerebral palsy. I think the reason I am in this chair is because I’m strong enough to handle it. Nothing gets me down.”

But what makes the 45-year-old Lakeview resident worry for his safety are the curbs and sidewalks that go unshoveled after a winter storm. He has toppled over backwards trying to scale ice-packed curbs with his wheelchair and been forced into the street with car traffic to bypass snowed-covered sidewalks.

“It’s kind of scary,” Guardino said. “But I’m used to it. I’ve been doing it pretty much my whole life. I’ve been hit a couple times. There was one time where someone hit me on Grand (Avenue) and didn’t even bother to look if I was OK.”

For Guardino and many others, help may be on the way if the Chicago City Council approves a pilot program to plow some city sidewalks. Last summer, the City Council commissioned a group to study options for a pilot program. It is scheduled to report back in the spring with a plan for potential approval. If all goes smoothly, snow plowing could begin as soon as next winter.

For now, the responsibility for clearing sidewalk snow falls on property owners. But critics say that it often fails to work because it relies on people who may be unwilling or unable to do the job.

Details of the pilot program, including the cost, are unknown, but the pilot aims to focus on clearing sidewalks in areas with public transit, high populations of people who are elderly or disabled, and areas that have typically been starved of resources. Hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans — young parents with strollers, the elderly, disabled people — can be stuck at home if their sidewalks are not shoveled, according to city officials.

If enacted, Chicago would join other cities that provide sidewalk snow clearance where residents enjoy the service, but it doesn’t come cheap. On the East Coast, Syracuse, New York, plows some of its sidewalks, while Toronto clears all of its sidewalks for a small fraction of what Chicago spends, for instance, on police overtime each year.

“Frankly, this is incredibly bread-and-butter government service in so many ways,” said Michael Podgers, a policy lead at Better Streets Chicago, a transit advocacy group supporting the plan.

“For a lot of people, it’s going to be a wonderful benefit that they won’t have to get up in the morning and shovel their sidewalks again.”

‘My mom fell, broke her arm and needed stitches’

In the past five years, Chicagoans have made more than 22,000 complaints to 311 for unshoveled sidewalks, city records show.

These complaints describe negligent landlords failing to clean up their walkways, snow and ice accumulations on sidewalks next to empty lots as well as slip-and-fall hazards for the elderly.

“I’m a disabled veteran with hip problems,” a Lakeview resident reported in November 2019. “I walk a large service dog and I have already slipped on this street three times since the last snowfall.”

“This owner did not clear their sidewalk or ice and snow,” a Little Village resident wrote in January 2022. “My mom fell, broke her arm and needed stitches. They need to be fined.”

“PERSON IN WHEELCHAIR CAN NOT SHOVEL AND SNOW IS SO BAD THAT HE IS BLOCKED IN AND CAN NOT LEAVE HIS HOUSE,” an Englewood resident wrote in February 2021.

Residents are supposed to call 311 to get the city to address the unshoveled sidewalks but that often fails to work.

City employees are almost just as likely to leave a flier at the offending property reminding the landowner  — if one is around— to shovel the sidewalk as they were to report that the offender was in “compliance” and the snow was removed, which can occur several days after the complaint is made.

While not singling out sidewalk shoveling, City Inspector General Deborah Witzburg took aim at the “complaint-based” approach to providing services in an advisory opinion issued earlier this year. She called the city’s ask-and-you-may-receive approach a “reactive strategy that can increase long-term costs, prevent the optimal provision of public services and neglect people and communities less likely to register complaints.”

“By relying on complaints to allocate resources, the city delivers less comprehensive services to fewer Chicagoans,” Witzburg wrote.

To punish offenders, Chicago issued more than 3,200 tickets for unshoveled sidewalks in the past decade, totaling about $1 million. City data shows that only a small portion of these tickets were issued between the time a 311 complaint for unshoveled snow was opened and closed, suggesting the tickets were issued for reasons other than the 311 complaints.

According to city records, the biggest offender is a resident of south suburban New Lenox, who bought a lot in the Englewood neighborhood for $12,500 from the city six years ago. The lot was developed into a tire store, now defunct, and the city has fined the landowner nearly $20,000 for failing to keep the sidewalk clear of snow. He could not be reached for comment.

Altogether, these fines are a pittance in the City of Chicago’s $16.7 billion annual budget, and the tickets do not ensure that the snow is removed.

Laura Saltzman, a senior policy analyst with disability rights group Access Living, put the problem bluntly.

“Fines don’t shovel sidewalks,” Saltzman said.

As Chicago ponders plan, Canadians enjoy clear sidewalks

As Chicago considers its own response to city-funded sidewalk snow clearance, they may look to Toronto for inspiration.

Last year, the home of Drake and the Maple Leafs spent the equivalent of $26.5 million — or about 11% of what Chicago police spent on overtime in 2023 — to plow about 4,900 miles of sidewalk.

“We’ve been clearing the snow off of sidewalks for years,” said Vincent Sferrazza, director of operations and maintenance, transportation services for the City of Toronto. “Once you start it, you’re never going to lose it.”

Sferrazza said the program started in 1998 after the Canadian government incorporated many of the city’s suburbs into the Toronto city limits, boosting the city’s population from 600,000 to 2.4 million. Right now, about 3 million people live in Toronto, making it the fourth largest city in North America — just above Chicago.

Toronto deploys sidewalk plows after about 2 centimeters of snow falls, Sferrazza said. There are two crews that do the work: a crew of contractors who sweep through the formerly suburban portions of the city with sidewalk-sized plows and a crew of City of Toronto employees who use smaller equipment to fit the tinier walkways of old Toronto. It takes about 12 hours to finish one round of clearance with about 80% of the work being completed by the contractors.

Sferrazza warned that the process isn’t perfect. Sidewalks rarely get as clear as a salted street, as passing cars activate the salt in cold temperatures, and occasionally, crews damage personal property.

“You’re going to hit somebody’s fence,” he said. “I don’t care how good of a driver you are. I don’t care how experienced you are. Remember, you are doing these operations at 3 a.m., you can’t see a thing, it’s your first round and all you see is white.”

Chicago is not an exact equivalent to Toronto. Chicago has more poverty than Toronto, and Toronto gets more snow than Chicago. But transit advocates say that the cities have comparable density, population and sidewalk mileage.

Stateside, Chicago could take some pointers from Syracuse, New York. The upstate college town has provided plowing for a portion of its sidewalks intermittently since 2019.

Corey Driscoll Dunham, the chief operations officer for the Syracuse mayor’s office, said they plow 156 miles of sidewalk, with a budgeted cost of $322,000. The city uses a contractor — the only one to submit a bid for the work — after about 3 inches of snow accumulates, and the process of clearing the sidewalks takes six to eight hours.

Syracuse has assessed snow-clearance fees on homes and businesses to pay for the program, which does not include salting. Annual fees will top out at $100 for residential properties and $300 for businesses, and they fund the city’s sidewalk budget, which also pays for sidewalk repair.

Cherlnell Lane, who lives in the Washington Park neighborhood, says that whatever Chicago has to pay to keep the sidewalks clear will be worth it.

Lane lives in housing for people with disabilities and has used an electric wheelchair for 12 years due to complications from an auto-immune disorder and arthritis.

After a heavy snowfall, Lane says she has had to choose between staying at home or driving her electric wheelchair into traffic on Michigan Avenue to travel six blocks to her local library branch. Snow accumulates next door on the sidewalk in front of a city-owned lot that makes it impassable.

“I believe that politicians in office should be looking after their constituents,” said Lane, 41. “They should be looking after all of us, not just some of us. Just like we find the money for everything else, like flowers downtown, we should be able to get things together to make this program happen.”

Dolton Mayor Tiffany Henyard stepped up efforts to distance herself from the cancer foundation bearing her name after the Illinois Attorney General’s office banned the nonprofit from raising money and indicated the latest paperwork it filed with the state failed to provide basic information.

In an appearance last week on a prominent national webcast, Henyard, who is also the Thornton Township supervisor, told former CNN host Roland Martin that she doesn’t “have a foundation” and doesn’t know anything about the state intervening in the operation of the Tiffany Henyard Cares Foundation.

“If someone uses my name to push their charity or if you say ‘this is [a] Tiffany t-shirt’ people gonna buy it,” said Henyard, who appeared on the #RolandMartinUnfiltered webcast amid news reports that she is under FBI investigation. “People make money off my name … ”

Henyard’s current efforts to dissociate herself from the foundation is in stark contrast to the time she spent in 2022 promoting the foundation and raising money for it, and her close personal and professional ties to the foundation’s leadership.

Henyard did not return phone calls and emails this week seeking comment.

But last year, Henyard told Illinois Answers Project and FOX 32 Chicago that she is “the face of the foundation” but also “my face is nowhere” near the operation or its leadership, which consists of people who work for her in south suburban government, including her boyfriend, according to court records. A new filing in a separate court case alleges the nonprofit has paid him to serve on the board but doesn’t specify how much.

Henyard also vigorously promoted the foundation during a trip to Springfield that lasted more than a week in October 2022. The trip aimed to support a bill to help cancer victims, but the bill was never filed, and the State Legislature was not in session.

During the journey, Henyard rode an electric bicycle with the phrases “Super Mayor” and “Tiffany A. Henyard Cares Foundation” on the bicycle’s frame. Along the way she promoted T-shirts and sweatshirts for sale that displayed the name of the foundation and her signature.

“Again if you want to be part of our movement, the Tiffany Henyard Cares Foundation, you can go to THCares.org and you can donate today,” she said in a video filmed during her trip.

Even after submitting some additional paperwork to the state last week, the nonprofit remains barred from fundraising. The Illinois Attorney General’s Office says the nonprofit must produce such information as expenditure and revenue reports as well as a letter from the IRS certifying its status as a tax-exempt organization if it wants to fundraise again.

The scant paperwork that was submitted shows the foundation raised exactly $13,000 to date and has recorded no expenses.

Shortly after the foundation registered with the state in 2022, Henyard voted with the Thornton Township Board to give the nonprofit $10,000, and the township and village spent more than $11,500 on expenses related to the trip. Records also show Henyard authorized a separate $17,000 payment from the township for 1,000 white hoodies and T-shirts. An invoice for the clothing was submitted one day after the paperwork for Henyard’s foundation was submitted to the state.

The latest paperwork indicates that a Chicago area businessman named Victor Osaque took over the job as the nonprofit’s registered agent from Dolton Village Manager Jason Freeman, just days after Illinois Answers reached Freeman at village hall to ask about his role.

Osaque, who is listed on the paperwork as a consultant, told Illinois Answers when reached for comment that “this is not supposed to be what I signed up for.” He said he needed to consult with his attorney before speaking further.

State records show that in addition to working for the nonprofit, Osaque filed the business registration with the state on behalf of a clothing store and restaurant in southeast suburban Glenwood that are owned by Henyard’s boyfriend, Kamal Woods, who traveled with her during the trip to Springfield.

Woods is listed as a director of the Tiffany Henyard Cares Foundation and worked as the Thornton Township Youth Program director, which paid $76,923 in 2023, records show.

According to a petition for child support in an ongoing divorce case between Woods and his wife, Henyard is Woods’ “paramour.” The filing states that Woods earns “a highly lucrative salary — in excess of $100,0000 per year” working at the township in addition to his side gig providing private security for local government.

Woods “earns income serving on the board of trustees of his paramour’s purported non-for-profit, [the] Tiffany Henyard Cares Foundation,” but is reluctant to report his income “from all sources as a result of his connections with a paramour who is being investigated by the FBI for, upon information and belief, public fraud and financial malfeasance,” according to the court filing.

Woods hung up on a reporter when reached for comment.

The Tiffany Henyard Cares Foundation, named after the self-proclaimed south suburban “people’s mayor” who steered thousands of taxpayer dollars into the nonprofit’s coffers, is no longer allowed to solicit donations after blowing multiple deadlines to produce legally-required tax filings to the state.

Pasquale Esposito, the deputy bureau chief of the office’s charitable trust bureau, notified the foundation of the decision on Wednesday after the nonprofit missed the latest reporting deadline of last Friday. State statute requires all charities to file financial information such as annual income expenditures to the Illinois Attorney General’s office, so the public can be well informed before making donations.

“The attorney general is committed to protecting donors from potential fraud and enforcing state laws in place to ensure charitable organizations meet their financial responsibilities,” said an Illinois Attorney General office spokesperson.

Esposito said in his letter to the Tiffany Henyard Cares Foundation’s board of directors that it is “unlawful for the Foundation to solicit, receive or otherwise hold any funds in the State of Illinois while it remains unregistered.”

Esposito noted that even after his office sent letters notifying the nonprofit of the outstanding documents, “the foundation has not responded, and we have not been advised why there has been a delay.” He asked the organization to “please make this a matter of urgent priority” and to submit the documents to him by March 13.

Multiple messages and emails left for Henyard were not returned, and the nonprofit’s website appeared defunct as of Wednesday afternoon.

The Illinois Answers Project and FOX 32 first reported last year that Henyard, in her role as Thornton Township supervisor, voted along with the township board to cut a check for $10,000 in taxpayer money to the foundation, which claims to help people with cancer. Government resources, such as township vehicles, were also used to solicit donations for the nonprofit.

After directing the money to the nonprofit, Henyard and her supporters took a bicycle trip to Springfield in support of what they said was cancer legislation. But a bill was never filed, and the State Legislature was not in session at the time of their trip. Nevertheless, the township and village were on the hook for more than $11,500 spent on hotels, restaurants and other businesses statewide during the journey, which lasted more than a week.

Records also show Henyard authorized a separate $17,000 payment from the township for 1,000 white hoodies and T-shirts. An invoice for the clothing was submitted one day after the paperwork for Henyard’s foundation was submitted to the state.

Illinois Answers subsequently filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court against the Village of Dolton after the village failed to turn over credit card bills regarding trip expenses in response to a records request. The lawsuit is pending.

Documents show that the foundation’s board members are all people who work for the village or township. Keith Freeman, the Dolton village manager and Henyard’s paid senior advisor at the township, filed the initial paperwork for the nonprofit and was listed as an officer for the group as of October 2023.

He declined to comment on Tuesday afternoon, saying he was at work.

“I can’t have this conversation with you right now,” he said.

In its latest legal salvo, the City of Chicago is seeking to consolidate thousands of debts it says are held by a north suburban woman and real estate companies tied to her, dubbing them “extreme scofflaws” for amassing millions of dollars in unpaid rat-related tickets.

The city is asking a judge to combine all of the debts into one so that all the judgments can be “pursued together in the most efficient manner possible,” according to court records.

The filings allege altogether that the woman, Northbrook resident Suzie B. Wilson, and her 27 companies owe the city more than $9.3 million from about 5,140 judgments issued for violations occurring across more than 600 properties in the city since January 2018.

This comes after the Illinois Answers Project and Block Club Chicago revealed earlier this year that Wilson had managed companies that accumulated more than $15 million worth of tickets written for violations on mostly vacant properties in the South and West sides of Chicago as far back as 2010.

Wilson and the companies, according to the city’s court filings, “rarely, if ever, do anything at all to maintain these properties.”

“They are a blight on the communities that must suffer their presence and subject the residents of those communities to dangerous and unhealthy conditions,” the filing states.

The investigation explained why the city of Chicago was losing the war on rats, leaving residents in the lurch, and how it infrequently went after property owners even after they were ticketed for rat-related offenses. The companies that the city ties to Wilson had amassed the largest debt, according to an Illinois Answers analysis. 

“The Judgment Debtor has failed to pay any of those Judgments and has done nothing to fix the significant underlying problems that cause so much harm to the City and its residents,” the filing states.

Wilson had been listed as the agent manager for all of the companies until Illinois Answers and Block Club reported her name in connection with the companies and the debts. Less than a week later, Wilson’s name was removed as manager from the companies’ corporate filings, and the managers are now limited liability companies based in South Dakota, a state with records laws that do not require companies to list which individuals manage the companies. An attorney whom Wilson tapped in an unrelated lawsuit is now the agent for the companies. He declined to comment.

Illinois Answers and Block Club reported last month that the city had jumped into the legal battle between Wilson and the Chicago Transit Authority, which needs eight properties that the real estate empire owns that are in the path of the $3.6 billion Red Line Extension Project. The CTA wants to extend the train line 5.6 miles south to 130th street and needs the land as part of its plan, but the two sides can’t agree on a price.

Previously, one of Wilson’s companies sued the city, claiming that it was unconstitutional for the city to fine the company for failing to cut its weeds, but a federal judge dismissed the case.

Messages left for Wilson and her attorneys were not returned.

Charles Randle, once an inmate at Stateville Correctional Center, recalled waking up one morning in that prison with a roach inside his ear.

Billy Johnson, who lost his hearing at 2-years-old due to an illness, said he can’t earn his GED at the Danville Correctional Center because prison officials won’t provide a sign language interpreter.

Aaron Fillmore, locked up for 25 years in solitary confinement at a handful of Illinois prisons, says he doubts he is mentally fit to share a cell.

All three men have been plaintiffs in federal lawsuits filed against the State of Illinois, alleging that their constitutional rights were violated by the Illinois Department of Corrections, which houses about 30,000 people in the state’s prisons. Over the years, judges have taken the unusual step of certifying these complaints as class actions and, in some cases, have ordered the state to improve conditions for inmates who are deaf, mentally or physically ill, held in solitary confinement or housed at Stateville Correctional Center, which inmates say is dilapidated and filled with vermin.

Progress has been slow as the bill to taxpayers keeps rising. Court-ordered audits show the IDOC continues to fail to provide basic care to inmates — a point underscored by the Illinois Answers Project in interviews with more than a dozen people who are incarcerated. The state has paid more than $13 million in legal fees and fines so far as part of the settlements and faces an ultimate tab of hundreds of millions of dollars to fulfill settlement requirements. Separately, a report published earlier this year estimates the state has a multibillion dollar backlog in maintenance expenses to repair its dilapidated prisons, some of which date to the 19th century.

David Muhammad, who was federal monitor of the Illinois parole system, said that there’s “no question” Illinois could have avoided the extra costs inherent in the settlement agreements if the IDOC operated a better system.

“The state could have just not treated inmates horribly,” said Muhammad, who is now the executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform.  

The IDOC denied the claims made by the plaintiffs in the lawsuits but declined to comment further in detail, citing the active litigation.

‘There’s no treatment occurring’

A federal lawsuit filed in 2007 alleged that mentally ill people in Illinois prisons were “subjected to brutality instead of compassion, and housed in conditions that beggar imagination,” spurring numerous reforms over the years.

Even as the quality of care remains in question 16 years later, a federal judge ruled in October to end the lawsuit for procedural reasons.

Attorneys who represent the inmates say they plan to appeal the ruling, which cuts off any future reimbursement of legal fees. U.S. District Court Judge Michael Mihm’s decision to end the case disappointed them, they said, because of the treatment gaps that still exist despite the sweeping changes to inmate mental health care that the lawsuit ushered into the state’s prison system.

Chief among those changes is the construction of a new mental health facility — the Joliet Treatment Center — and an in-patient treatment facility at the Joliet campus. State records show that in the past five years, the state has spent $213 million for these facilities and other lawsuit-related mental health improvements. Attorneys contend the in-patient facility, which has 200 beds, is barely used despite a significant demand.

A court monitor appointed to oversee the settlement said in an August 2022 report that more work remains. The IDOC was still noncompliant with broad swaths of the settlement agreement including evaluations and referrals, use of physical restraints, as well as use of force and discipline for “seriously mentally ill offenders.”

Muhammad, the former court monitor, said that settlement agreements such as the one for the IDOC’s mentally ill inmates can be effective “blunt instruments.”

“The challenge is sometimes they stick around way too long, sometimes some of the conditions are wonky and don’t make real practical sense,” he said. “But there’s a ton of reform that has occurred from them.”

The IDOC issued a statement that said the changes made as a result of the mental health care lawsuit “remain engrained in its policies and procedures.” 

“The IDOC will continue to provide comprehensive mental health services for its residents in custody,” the statement said.

Patrice Daniels was the leading plaintiff in the lawsuit. He is serving a life sentence at the Joliet Treatment Center, a facility with single occupancy cells for inmates who have serious mental illness. He says he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and bears scars from self-inflicted cuts.

“There’s no treatment occurring,” said Daniels, who pleaded guilty to a 1994 murder in Grant Park in exchange for a sentence of life in prison instead of the death penalty, which was abolished in Illinois in 2011. “It’s only a treatment facility in name. Nobody is getting better in that sense.”

People in the prison, he said, are sent to the segregation unit if they act out as a result of their mental illness, which makes it worse.

“There are guys where, as a consequence of their severe mental illness, voices sometimes tell them to be violent towards other people,” Daniels said. “I present very well, but most people who aren’t clinicians don’t understand the challenge that it takes for me daily not to (self-harm).”

A 2016 survey of state and federal prisoners showed 41% of inmates reporting a history of mental illness.

Attorney Alan Mills of the Uptown People’s Law Center represents Daniels and other inmates in reform-minded lawsuits. He acknowledged the snail’s pace of progress but said that when the lawsuit began, mental health care in Illinois prisons consisted of monthly appointments where some people received medication and everyone else was placed into solitary confinement. Through several changes made in a 2016 legal agreement, people with diagnosed mental illness receive monthly check-ins with mental health staff or a mental health group, and everyone has a treatment plan.

“The quality of the treatment plan remains in question,” Mills said. “The problem is that getting a consent decree is, as hard as it may be, the easy part. Actually getting changes in the system is the harder part.”

Small steps in solitary confinement reform

A federal lawsuit filed in 2016 alleged that people in Illinois prisons were getting thrown into solitary confinement for long periods of time for “even the most minor prison infractions,” and “minimal processes” existed for people to prove their innocence.

The lawsuit said that people in solitary confinement live in “tiny, often windowless cages” that are smaller than the 50-square-feet prison cells that the Illinois Legislature requires for new construction of prison dorms, and likened the practice of using solitary confinement as punishment to torture.

Mills said that in response to the lawsuit IDOC officials rewrote their rules for solitary confinement to shorten sentences and provide a way for inmates to work themselves out of segregation.

Still, about 4% of the inmate population has remained in solitary confinement, a number that has remained mostly unchanged since 2017, court filings show. More than 5,400 inmates have spent at least one year in solitary confinement during the past dozen years. Eleven people have spent a dozen or more years in solitary confinement during that time.

Aaron Fillmore, 48, was first placed in solitary confinement after he was accused of having a role in a February 1997 scalding oil attack on a warden, his assistant and a guard, who visited him in his cell at Menard Correctional Center, court records show. He was later released from solitary but then returned to the segregation unit after he stabbed a Will County correctional officer, which he pleaded guilty to in 1999 in exchange for an additional 20-year sentence. He was transferred to Tamms Correctional Center, a maximum security prison in southern Illinois where most inmates spent 23 or 24 hours alone in their cells “without social interaction, human contact, or sensory stimulation,” according to one report. After Tamms’ closure 11 years ago, Fillmore spent time in solitary confinement at prisons in Pontiac and Lawrence before he was transferred in June to a New Mexico prison.

In correspondence with Illinois Answers written earlier this year, Fillmore described being locked inside his cell “basically 24/7.”

“Being in isolation, chained and shackled every place I go, forced to exercise in a small dog cage has taken a toll on my body and mind,“ wrote Fillmore, who was given a 75-year sentence connected to the 1994 murder of a Plano woman. “I have gum problems because I would brush my teeth so much out of just being bored.”

‘I been dealing with so much pain’

Research shows that prison conditions and the bare-bones health care offered behind bars can take years off a person’s life.

The dismal state of prison health care and outcomes for inmates is no different in Illinois, where the widely criticized private prison health care company Wexford has operated the state’s prison health care system since 2011 in exchange for more than $1 billion in taxpayer money.

A court monitor reported last year that the IDOC’s clinical care remains poor, record-keeping for vaccinations is non-existent, and there is no data to show that screenings for the two leading causes of cancer deaths within the prison system — liver and lung cancer — are being performed.

The monitoring was ordered through a settlement in the lawsuit that inmate Donald Lippert filed in 2010, alleging the IDOC denied him access to health care and refused to provide him with the food he needed to manage his diabetes. 

In a phone interview, Lippert said he still gets meals of pasta and potatoes three times daily, which makes his blood sugar spike.

“It makes me feel tired, miserable,” said Lippert, who is serving a 140-year prison sentence in connection with multiple murders. “It takes a big toll on my organs, my blood vessels, my eyes.”

To date, the state has spent more than $5.5 million on costs related to the case.

According to interviews with attorneys and reform advocates, the overall bill for Illinois taxpayers — more than $13 million stemming from a handful of protracted lawsuits — is low compared with California, which generates millions of dollars in legal fees each year from similar cases. Inmates in Arizona, Georgia and Massachusetts have also used class action lawsuits to successfully challenge what they allege are civil rights violations.

Illinois’ latest prison health care monitor’s report said the patient care for inmates who are elderly, disabled or infirm is “consistent with neglect and abuse,” and that inmates with dementia signed “do not resuscitate” documents or wills when they “clearly were not of sound mind and could not willfully and voluntarily do so,” according to the report.

As of June, there were more than 1,200 inmates in the IDOC who are 65 or older.

One example in the report described a 74-year-old patient losing 61 pounds and then dying of septic shock, a perforated colon and rectal cancer in July 2021 after doctors failed to order a colonoscopy and diagnose the disease for a year and a half.

“This was a basic medical judgment issue that was addressed in an unsafe and harmful manner,” the report said, recommending the doctor for peer review.

Lazerrick Coffee, a plaintiff in the lawsuit, said IDOC refused to help him manage the pain he suffers from sickle cell anemia, which causes him to develop ulcers and experience extreme pain informally called a “sickle cell crisis.” He said prison officials removed him from the doctor-prescribed treatment — Tylenol and a painkiller — that he had taken for nine years ending in 2020, when he began his sentence.

“He told me that I was taken off the medication I was getting for 9 years because it’s a narcotic, but ever since I been off that medication I been dealing with so much pain,” wrote Coffee, who is serving a 13-year sentence at Pinckneyville Correctional Center for carjacking. “It gets to a point that I cry, my (cellmates) will try to help but they really can’t do nothing.”

The legal proceedings for the prison health care lawsuit have been fraught. Last year, a federal judge held the IDOC in contempt for failing to create an implementation plan as required by a consent decree.

A prison singled out for reforms

Ten years ago, Lester Dobbey filed a lawsuit alleging that Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill was filled with vermin, birds and mold, and other structural problems that made the facility hazardous to inmates’ health.

Dobbey told Illinois Answers in a phone interview about a wide range of safety and sanitary concerns at the prison: cracks separating the building from the roof, roaches freely scuttling around the food serving line, flocks of as many as 50 birds flying around the prison at night, expelling waste into the living quarters of inmates. He recalled one incident from when he was working in a kitchen, passing out what he thought were chocolate chip cookies from a garbage bag.

“I get to the bottom and it’s hundreds upon hundreds of mice pellets all in the bag,” said Dobbey, who has since been transferred to the Danville Correctional Center. “So I’ve been serving mice crap on cookies.”

An IDOC-commissioned master plan published in May estimated that the prison has $286 million worth of “deferred maintenance,” a significant part of the $2.5 billion maintenance backlog that exceeds the IDOC’s annual budget by $670 million.

The report took special aim at Stateville’s sleeping quarters, saying that its dorms “are not suitable for any 21st century correctional center.” Last year, hundreds of inmates were transferred out of the building after two water heaters at the facility broke down.

“The Quarterhouse particularly has a design developed during the penitentiary period of the 1800’s,” the study states, noting that $12 million in immediate structural repairs are needed.

The report suggested building new housing at Stateville to “help create a positive environment for staff and inmates.” The estimated cost for 700 new beds at Stateville? $72 million.

“The place is literally falling apart, the infrastructure is gone,” said Charles Randle, an inmate at Stateville from 2017 to 2021, when he was transferred to Menard. “You can’t do any major work or it will collapse. It’s like you’re trying to bring a dinosaur back to life.”

Heather Lewis Donnell, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said that since the lawsuit was filed, the number of people staying at the prison has plunged from more than 1,000 inmates to about 500 and the decrepit “F-House” dorm was closed, except for temporary use as a COVID-19 infirmary early on in the pandemic. She was unsure when the case would end but said that significant changes would need to occur before then.

“We’d like to see it be a humane, habitable prison for the residents,” Lewis Donnell said.

Hearing lawsuit ends

The IDOC was ordered to pay about $430,000 in fees and fines earlier this year as part of a settlement of a 13-year-old case that sought to provide interpreters and hearing aids for inmates who are deaf or hard of hearing.

Amanda Antholt, an attorney with the firm Equip for Equality that represented inmates in the lawsuit, said that IDOC reported in April 2022 there were 1,695 inmates in custody who identified as deaf or hard of hearing.

IDOC had agreed to screen new inmates for hearing, provide communication plans and hearing aids for inmates who were deaf or hard of hearing, and supply American Sign Language translators for all “high-stakes interactions” such as medical and mental health care appointments, disciplinary hearings, educational and vocational programs.

The IDOC noted in a January filing that in November 2022 there were 55 “high-stakes” interactions involving inmates who were deaf or hard of hearing and 48 of those involved an interpreter.

“Despite a few issues at the remaining facilities, the issues are sporadic, not systemic, and are resolved when they arise,” the report stated.

Billy Johnson, who is serving a 53-year sentence for murder and robbery at Danville Correctional Center, said that isn’t always the case.

Johnson said his concerns about access to interpreters and other tools that would help him communicate as a person who is deaf get brushed aside. One of his goals is earning his GED so that he can join a carpenter’s apprenticeship upon release, but the IDOC refuses to place him into the program, which would require an American Sign Language interpreter.

“I feel like they force me to try to feel like I’m hearing, which obviously isn’t an option for me,” said Johnson through an ASL interpreter. “I do a lot of watching and looking and wondering what’s going on.”

“All the hearing guys, they get their GED, they go to college and I’m over in the corner working hard. I’m trying to get my GED, I’m trying to go to college, but it’s not accessible to me.”

Tillie Lloyd, Johnson’s fiance, is also deaf. The 39-year-old resident of Chicago’s Riverdale neighborhood said through an interpreter that she is “very angry” about the services that are being denied to Billy on account of his disability.

“I want to see him get a better life,” Lloyd said. “I want to see him get a second chance.”

A network of real estate companies that owe more than $15 million to the city in rat-related tickets involving hundreds of properties could finally have to pay the piper.

The City of Chicago is jumping into a legal battle with its hand out as the CTA wrangles in court with the companies over eight properties. The CTA needs the land as part of its extension of the Red Line but they can’t agree on the price.

The move by the city comes just weeks after an investigation by the Illinois Answers Project and Block Club Chicago showed how the city was failing in its battle against rats, including how the city wasn’t collecting fines issued to the biggest debtors.

At the top of the list were the network of companies that have had ties to Suzie B. Wilson, of Northbrook, which amassed more than $15 million in unpaid debts on hundreds of mostly vacant properties located on the city’s South and West sides.

Wilson had been listed as the manager of the companies for years but after the Illinois Answers/Block Club story came out, the agent of record for the companies and the listed managers were changed, Illinois state records show. Douglas Belofsky, an attorney who Wilson is using in an unrelated lawsuit, is now the agent of record for the companies. He declined to comment. The managers are now different LLCs based in South Dakota, and the public records in that state do not have to list which individuals manage the companies.

To stake its claim on the properties, the city officially recorded more than 40 court judgments for property violations such as failing to cut weeds and leaving out junk that can provide “potential rat harborage.” Some of these judgments were obtained years ago in administrative court but were only recorded after the Illinois Answers/Block Club investigation brought the potential CTA deals to light.

The City of Chicago Law Department declined to comment due to the litigation. Chasse Rehwinkel, the city comptroller who pledged to “enforce the rules of the road when it comes to our revenue collection” during his confirmation hearing, also declined to comment, deferring to the city’s law department. Redacted emails obtained by Illinois Answers show Rehwinkel called a meeting with the law department to discuss follow-up actions for the outstanding fees.

“Are we aware of this?” Rehwinkel said in his email to his City of Chicago Finance Department colleagues, sharing a link to the story about the debts. “What is the backstory? Can we collect these?”

Phone messages and emails left for Wilson and the attorney representing her in the CTA lawsuit were not returned. A spokesperson for the City Law Department declined to comment, citing active litigation.

The CTA is looking to acquire eight vacant properties owned by the companies that are in the footprint of the CTA’s $3.6 billion project to extend the Red Line 5.6 miles south to 130th Street. After failing to settle on a price, the CTA filed lawsuits against the companies that own the properties.

On Sept. 11, the city filed a motion court in one of the CTA’s cases, which is seeking to obtain a 3,125-square-foot vacant lot in the 300 block of West 111th Street that is owned by Vivid LLC, a company Wilson has managed. Five days earlier, the filing states, the city recorded previously obtained judgments against Vivid.

“Additionally, the City has recorded Judgments in other matters against Defendant Suzie Wilson, the manager and controller of Vivid,” the filing states. “Judgments against Defendant Suzie Wilson are a lien against her interest in the Property.”

In response, an attorney for Wilson and Vivid said that the city was trying to “boot-strap its claims on other properties” onto the Roseland parcel, and no judgements were recorded at the time the CTA filed its lawsuit to obtain the property. A judge has set a hearing in the matter.

So far the CTA has spent more than $7.5 million acquiring properties for the long-promised transit development, records show. Payouts for the properties range from a few thousand dollars for a 510-square-foot stretch of empty land to $784,000 for an 89,000-square-foot building that was once a concrete business. As such, properties that the companies scooped up for little or nothing in private transactions and tax sales decades ago could produce a big payday.

The eight properties in the footprint of the Red Line extension total 116,512 square feet, according to the assessor’s office.

Wilson has taken steps in getting these properties ready for sale. As of late July, she signed an affidavit correcting a 15-year-old mistake in the deed of one property.

Another company Wilson has managed previously sued the City of Chicago, alleging it was unconstitutional for the city to fine the company for failing to cut the weeds on its vast network of empty lots. The company lost the case, with one federal judge calling their arguments “ridiculous.”

Unpaid ticket debts held by the companies were uncovered during the Illinois Answers/Block Club investigation into Chicago’s rat problem, which found the Bureau of Rodent Control was understaffed and often days or weeks late in responding to complaints, which have surged to record levels in recent years.

Following the investigation, Mayor Brandon Johnson boosted the rodent control budget by $1.5 million, which would pay for three new rat control crews and pay for salary increases that were negotiated in a new union contract.

Contributing: Mina Bloom

This story was produced by the Illinois Answers Project, an investigations and solutions journalism news organization, and Block Club Chicago, a nonprofit newsroom focused on Chicago’s neighborhoods, in partnership with WGN Investigates.

Before moving into an apartment in Ukrainian Village last May, Liz Murray asked her new landlord if the vintage building had any rat problems.

The landlord assured her the six-flat, built in the early 1900s, was free of rodents, adding that pest control “routinely checks” for signs of infestations.

Months later, Murray found out none of that was true. 

In the spring, Murray’s then 15-year-old daughter heard clattering from their kitchen cabinets. At first Murray thought little of it, but her daughter was worried, so Murray set up a camera in the kitchen.

Turns out the camera wasn’t needed. As Murray was calling 311 one day for help, a rat shot across her apartment floor. The building’s maintenance man found their apparent entryway — a hole behind Murray’s kitchen cabinets, covered in rat droppings. Not long after, a neighbor across the hall reported he had caught two rats in his apartment.

Murray, 40, repeatedly turned to her landlord and the city for help, but her pleas to fix the persistent rat problem were rejected or ignored, leaving her “flabbergasted,” she said.

“When I spoke to [a city employee], I said, ‘This is a safety issue, you guys aren’t helping me. What can you do?’ They said, ‘You can try to talk to your landlord again, and I was like, ‘Who can help me have a safe place to live? I don’t have a safe, clean space, which is what I was guaranteed,’” she said.

Murray is hardly alone. An investigation by the Illinois Answers Project and Block Club Chicago shows that since the beginning of the pandemic, record rat complaints have overwhelmed city services. The city’s resources are stretched thin, and so many residents have complained that the city’s Inspector General’s office is auditing the Bureau of Rodent Control.

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Last year, Chicagoans made more than 50,000 rat complaints, a slight decline from the prior two years but still significantly more complaints than in recent years, according to data from the city’s 311 call center.

An investigation by Illinois Answers and Block Club has found that the city is ill-prepared to handle the surge of complaints. The city bureau tapped to combat rodents is short staffed and often days or weeks late in responding to complaints; its yard inspection service is limited in hours and excludes more than a third of Chicago homes. City loopholes also allow for major construction projects to begin without first addressing rat infestations. On the enforcement end, the city’s attempts to reign in the biggest violators with fines are often futile. In one instance, companies managed by a north suburban woman have incurred more than $15 million in unpaid, rat-related tickets on Chicago properties.

Most people, in fact, don’t pay their fines. The city has issued 117,000 rat-related tickets since 2019 totaling $153 million — with more than $126 million in ticket debt outstanding, according to an analysis of city data.

Streets and Sanitation Commissioner Cole Stallard and Rodent Control Deputy Commissioner Josie Cruz declined requests for an interview.

In emailed statements, a rodent control spokesperson noted that the requests for rodent abatement are “trending back towards pre-pandemic levels” even with the loss of staff, which the city attributes in part to retirements and transfers. The bureau increased its garbage cart replacement budget this year from $3.3 million to $4 million to stop rats from feasting inside broken garbage bins, records show.

But experts say the city’s efforts are no match for the city’s outsized rat problem. Chicago has topped pest control company Orkin’s list for rattiest city in the country for eight consecutive years.

“We’re outnumbered at this point. We’re way outnumbered,” said Janelle Iaccino, marketing director for Rose Pest Control. “It doesn’t give us much hope for coming down in the ranks for rattiest city.”

A puppy's short life

In Chicago and other cities across the country, rats are an inescapable part of everyday life. No matter where people live, they're likely to see rats scurrying across sidewalks and alleys and zipping into trash cans, searching for their next meal.

There's only one species in Chicago: The Norway rat. Female rats can give birth to more than 50 offspring per year. And several months after being born, female rats can reproduce. In the right environment, zoologists say, two rats can turn into several thousand over a year.

The high rate of reproduction is one reason the city can sometimes feel overrun by rats.

Rats can chew through electrical wires and destroy property, and while many people find them gross, they also pose serious health risks. The rats found in urban areas are “loaded with” diseases, said New York-based rodentologist Bobby Corrigan, who has studied rats for more than 30 years.

They carry a bacterial disease called leptospirosis, which can cause acute kidney failure and liver disease in pets. Records show that at least three people have reported since 2019 that it killed their dogs.

One of those people was Jennifer Bandola. She and her husband, Doug, lived in a house in the 1600 block of West Belle Plaine and had repeatedly called the city in 2020 to take care of a rat’s nest in their backyard, but nothing worked.

That same year, they adopted an 8-week-old bernedoodle, Georgia, and brought her home to their Lakeview home. Not long after, the puppy contracted leptospirosis and died.

“We didn’t have her very long, it was only a couple weeks,” she said. “She was just a sweet little dog who would walk around with her mouth open and wait to bite you.”

After Georgia died, they dug up the backyard flower bed where the rats lived and continued to call 311 to kill the rat’s nest, but the rats persisted. Heartbroken, the Bandolas left Chicago and moved to Bloomington-Normal.

“There is definitely something that needs to be done about the rats,” she said. “If it’s not the city who is responsible for it, I don’t know who is.”

Chicagoans have explored myriad approaches to kill the rats: dry ice, rat poison, garbage can repairs, taking a hands-off approach to urban coyotes, an army of feral cats that has also proved effective at killing songbirds. But what the situation actually demands is cleanliness because rats are only after one thing: food.

“Everyone thinks you get an exterminator, put out some poison, when in fact it’s not going to do much at all unless you correct that simple kindergarten lesson of keeping your place clean,” Corrigan said.

Chicago could benefit by following the lead of other cities that are attacking aggressive rat populations in new and interesting ways, experts say.

New York City recently hired its first-ever “Rat Czar,” Kathleen Corradi, to fight the city’s ongoing rat problem during an increase in rat sightings during the pandemic. City officials said New York City has seen a reduction in rat complaints after Corradi and her team focused on getting trash off the streets and out of the city’s waste stream.

In Somerville, Mass., a city of about 80,000, officials are using a new technology, called SMART Boxes, to reduce the rat population. The above-ground boxes trap rats and electrocute them but pose no risk to humans or pets, offering a safe alternative to poison and other traditional bait.

Colin Zeigler, Somerville’s environmental health coordinator, said the boxes are appealing in part because they collect data and send it to city officials wirelessly so they can look at trends.

Meanwhile in Chicago, city leaders haven’t announced a plan to address the rat complaints or even acknowledged there’s a problem, but the inspector general's office agreed to audit the Department of Rodent Control in January after it “received multiple complaints about the efficiency and effectiveness of the city’s rat abatement program,” according to the office's annual plan. The audit will examine response times to rat complaints and determine whether rodent control’s services are equitable and follow best practices.

The Bureau of Rodent Control has blown its stated goal of responding to each 311 complaint within five days in each of the last two years, according to an analysis of 311 data. It took more than 8 1/2 days to close out the median complaint last year and 10 days the year before, with some West and South side neighborhoods such as North Lawndale and Washington Heights taking more than two weeks to get complaints closed in recent years. At the same time, staffing at the bureau is down about a quarter of its employees since 2019, city records show.  A rodent control spokesperson suggested that the drop isn’t that great, noting, among other reasons, that some employees were inactive or on leave for part of that time. 

Geraldine Powell, a laborer with the bureau who retired last year, said the surge in complaints combined with the staffing shortages have stretched the city’s response times.

“You do as much as you can in the hours you have,” she said.

A citywide problem

Requests to 311 for rat control come in from all across the city, more than 546,000 in the past 13 years.

The requests do not necessarily indicate how many rats there are citywide because no one knows. City officials suggest the calls paint a better picture of who is calling, rather than where the problem is, but they can signal problem areas. And experts say that due to rats’ high rate of reproduction, delayed responses to rat complaints can result in infestations.

One of the top areas for requests is the Clearing neighborhood near Midway Airport, where residents have made 7,630 rat complaints to 311 in the past four years.

In the past two years, the city has taken longer to close out rat complaints made in Clearing and its adjacent neighborhoods of West Elsdon and West Lawn than anywhere in the city, data shows.

Tommy Lawler lives in a row house in Clearing’s Chrysler Village, which is tucked between the airport and the factories on 65th Street. He described cutting his friend’s front lawn and seeing 10 rats.

“They looked like they were in a fricking resort,” he said. “One of them was in a puddle like he was doing the doggy paddle or something. They were afraid of nothing! They didn’t care!”

In May, 13th Ward workers came to Lawler’s house and plugged a rat hole underneath his garage with dry ice, which evaporates into carbon dioxide and suffocates the rats. This service is offered to all residents of the ward, which includes the neighborhoods of Clearing and Garfield Ridge.

These appointments can be scheduled throughout the day and when residents are away from home. This offers more flexibility than the city’s yard inspection and rat abatement service, which is available in the narrow window of 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. Monday through Friday, and requires a person from the house to be in attendance.

“People can’t always be home during the day for different reasons,” said 13th Ward aldermanic assistant Jennifer Solski, who handles rat complaints. “They’ve got young families, taking their kids to school and working: they can't be home during regular office hours.”

What’s more, the 13th Ward’s dry ice treatment can be scheduled for all homes. The city’s baiting program is only available to homes with four units or fewer, which excludes most apartment buildings. About 518,000 buildings — or about 41% of the city’s housing stock — have more than four units and are ineligible for the city service, data shows.

Clearing is far from the high-density, restaurant-laden region of the city that is historically associated with rats. Local officials speculate that their rat deluge is linked to the construction of the neighborhood’s 114,000-square foot John C. Dore Elementary School, and various construction and demolition projects across the border in Bedford Park.

Under Chicago’s permitting process, contractors are not required to do rat abatement before getting most building permits. Only demolition permits require proof of rat abatement before they are issued. For construction that includes excavation, contractors are required to keep proof of rat abatement on site and make it available for inspection.

This means that pest control is only important if a city official asks for it, although one expert cautioned that rat abatement at construction or demolition sites isn’t necessarily a solution.

Corrigan, the New York City rodentologist, said that rats are “not inclined to infest any old, abandoned property,” especially if there is no food in the building or nearby.

Mating rats ruin backyard wine time

Amanda Weinberger and her husband, Jason, didn’t wait for the city to address their worsening rat problem.

They went to war with the rats that invaded their backyard.

Heading into summer, Jason Weinberger spent two hours every Saturday and Sunday for a month setting up rat traps and digging trenches behind their North Center home that are fortified with chicken wire to prevent the rats from burrowing into their backyard. This was after rats destroyed the foundation of their back patio, chewed up their manicured garden, bathed in their son’s water table, and copulated in the moonlight while Amanda Weinberger tried to enjoy one summer evening with her friend.

“Rats are mating in the backyard while I’m sitting there with twinkling lights trying to have a glass of wine and chatting with a girlfriend,” she said. “I can’t sit there and enjoy it because our conversation is interrupted by mating rats!”

By late July, the Weinbergers had killed 45 rats outside their home.

Amanda Weinberger blames nearby dumpsters overflowing with food scraps from two restaurants — which she regularly photographs — for attracting the rats. She said her repeated calls to 311 and the alderperson’s office to address the issue yielded only partial success. One of the restaurants now has additional garbage pickup, but the other still has an overflowing dumpster, she said.

Records show that the city has not issued tickets to either restaurant. Tickets are one way the city can crack down on rats, by citing restaurants or land owners for creating conditions that are hospitable to rats, such as leaving out food or letting weeds or junk overtake a lot. 

But when it comes to city services, there’s a disconnect. The Bureau of Rodent Control employees who work to mitigate the thousands of citywide rat complaints made to 311 each year do not write tickets themselves despite seeing the conditions firsthand. That job is left to other Street and Sanitation employees.

For tickets that are written, a majority go unpaid. To get a glimpse of the scofflaw rate on tickets  — $126 million in ticket debt outstanding, with $153 million tickets written since 2019 — consider the case of Northbrook resident Suzie B. Wilson.

Dozens of real estate companies managed by Wilson have collected nearly 8,000 tickets on hundreds of vacant properties. The companies, which are registered to a post office box in Glenview, owe more than $15 million to the city after paying a tiny portion of the total, city records show. Wilson declined to comment.

Most of the tickets issued to Wilson’s companies were assessed on properties scattered throughout the South and West sides. People are more likely to have rats or rat excrement in their homes in these regions of the city than North Siders, but are less likely to call 311 because they don’t feel the city will help them, according to Lincoln Park Zoo wildlife disease ecologist Maureen Murray, citing preliminary research.

"Somehow they always scratch and find their way in"

In 2021, a company managed by two brothers, Ariel and Raphael Lowenstein, bought a Woodlawn apartment complex for more than $6 million, adding to their growing South Side real estate portfolio.

Woodlawn is a trendy destination for investors. Once a white, middle-class neighborhood, Woodlawn experienced waves of white flight in the 1950s and decades of economic disinvestment. Now the neighborhood is the future home of President Barack Obama’s $830 million presidential center, a development sparking fears of gentrification.

Megan Franklin, 33, moved into the building in the 6600 block of South Kenwood Avenue nine years ago, before the Obama Center site was announced. She said that living conditions at the building, where she lives with her two young sons who go to school down the street, have worsened since the Lowenstein’s company purchased the site, leading to a building-wide rat infestation and the exodus of many tenants.

Franklin said she saw a rat run under her oven, and then she found a rat’s decaying carcass in the back of her oven. When she told the Lowensteins, Franklin said Raphael Lowenstein offered her $1,500 to find a new place to live, which she refused.

Raphael Lowenstein said in an interview that they kept up on pest control and that he made the offer to ease her out of the unit because she was months overdue on rent. Franklin attributes her delayed payments to “improper rent collection and bookkeeping.”

Raphael Lowenstein also said that when the company they manage bought the building, it was mired in violations and they poured more than a quarter million dollars into it to bring it up to code. Nevertheless, rats get in the building from residents leaving doors open or due to the building’s age.

Altogether, the city has fined Lowenstein’s companies more than $130,000 in rat-related violations such as overflowing dumpsters at more than a dozen residential buildings. The brothers say they do their best to stay on top of garbage collection and other problems that “every landlord struggles with.”

“We have a rat infestation in the city,” Raphael Lowenstein said. “Older buildings are much tougher, they have a lot more holes, you are always sealing up holes. Somehow they always scratch and find their way in."

"The rats have a party in my backyard"

Research shows rat exposure can hurt peoples’ mental and psychological health. Chicagoans have described feeling constant paranoia after discovering infestations.

Transcripts of complaints to 311 show many residents at their wit’s end.

“My mom who is 76 years old is being attacked in her house by giant rats,” a McKinley Park resident reported in April 2020. “They eat at her toes at night, she told me. I was talking to her on the phone in the afternoon and a rat [was] trying to jump on her face. This was a week ago. She won't leave her apartment.”

“The rats have a party in my backyard,” a Ukrainian Village resident reported in July 2022. “They are enjoying my tomatoes. I worked hard to plant tomatoes and they are going to the rats! I have about six Tomcat bait stations in my yard, and I am still getting rats eating tomatoes!”

Rats can even undermine Chicago residents’ ability to get around town.

At least 38 people have complained about rats chewing through their car wires since 2019, according to the city’s 311 database.

Husband-and-wife Scott Tooredman and Emily Rose Asher had parked their 2011 Volkswagen behind their Humboldt Park apartment building for several years without any issues. But last year, they were forced out of the spot — not by a bad landlord, but by rats with a special interest in their car wires.

Tooredman and Asher’s car started acting up last summer: The check engine light went on, then the steering wheel stopped working.

When Tooredman asked neighbors who work on cars in his alley for their help, they found a decapitated rat in the engine. 

They removed the dead rat, and Tooredman got the engine belt replaced, but the car kept malfunctioning.

Once, Asher accidentally left the windows down, and when Tooredman got into the car later that day, a rat jumped on his shoulder and ran up his arm.

The rats were coming from a nest in the building's back stairwell, Tooredman said.

Tooredman said his landlord had multiple pest control companies out to kill the rats, but nothing worked. The rats kept coming.

The battle cost the couple at least $4,000 in car repair bills and reliable transportation for more than a year.

As for Murray, whose Ukrainian Village apartment was infested with rats, she said her daughter was “terrified that she’s going to see one and one’s going to run across the floor.”

“It’s very unnerving, very stressful and I would even use the word traumatic,” she said.

When it became clear the city and her landlord weren’t going to do meaningful abatement in the building, Murray prepared to move. She worked 16 hours a day to pay for a security deposit, an “incredibly stressful” endeavor, she said.

It was hard leaving an affordable apartment they had liked before the rats invaded.

Murray eventually found a new place near Logan Square and Hermosa after weeks of searching, but the ordeal left her demoralized.

“I’m honestly just shocked at not only my landlord’s unwillingness to deal with the issue, but also, I don’t know where the city stands on taking care of the issue,” Murray said.

Murray’s landlord didn’t return messages seeking comment. Records show the city baited the alley outside the building; the Bureau of Rodent Control does not place rat poison inside buildings or in the yards of apartment buildings. They did not fine the landlord or issue any rat-related building code violations.

When Murray posted about her rat problem on Facebook, several people commented, saying they had similar experiences.

“My gosh,” she recalled thinking. “How many other people are dealing with this?”

This story is part of a larger series by the Illinois Answers Project and Block Club Chicago.