By A.D. Quig
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — Aldermen on the city’s Finance Committee approved $15.5 million in taxpayer-funded legal settlements Wednesday to two families whose loved ones died, lawyers said, after police and Fire Department workers violated city policy.
An $8 million settlement to the family of Leonardo Guerrero, who died in 2022 in a Chicago Fire Department ambulance, passed with some minor opposition from aldermen. The Cook County medical examiner’s office found that restraints that paramedics used in the ambulance — in addition to the effects of cocaine, alcohol and heart disease — contributed to his death and ruled it a homicide.
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And they advanced a separate $7.5 million settlement to the family of Yvonne Lee-Wilson and Adelbert Wilson, who were killed by a driver being pursued by police in late February 2022 on the city’s Far South Side.
According to the Guerrero lawsuit, paramedics were called to the Uptown neighborhood at about 2:30 a.m. on Aug. 31, 2022, and found Guerrero naked, surrounded by police and “in a state of physical and emotional duress.”
Guerrero said he was going to die and having trouble breathing. The suit claims paramedics Joseph Schultz and Dakota Ibrahim did not examine Guerrero for vital signs or ask for his medical history, telling him to get up and walk to the ambulance without help, despite department policy calling for use of a gurney.
Guerrero struggled in the ambulance for about three minutes, at one point trying to get out, deputy corporation counsel Margaret Mendenhall Casey said Wednesday. Paramedics put him on a stretcher with a chest restraint to drive to a nearby hospital and handcuffed him to it. In the ambulance, Mendenhall Casey said, paramedics did not call ahead to the hospital, nor did they interact with Guerrero, check on his baseline vitals, oxygen levels, or brain function.
During that ride, Guerrero continued to have trouble breathing and fell in and out of consciousness, according to the suit.
When the ambulance got to the hospital, there was not a bed ready and they waited in the ambulance bay. After roughly five or six minutes, a police officer told paramedics Guerrero did not seem to be breathing. Despite CPR efforts, Guerrero died in the emergency room.
Ibrahim filed an official report claiming that he called the hospital three times before arriving — policy to secure a bed or make sure doctors or nurses can respond when they arrive — and had checked his brain function. Chicago Police Department body-camera video from one of the officers that rode along shows he did not, the suit said. Guerrero’s family initially asked for $35 million.
Ibrahim was fired, a Law Department spokesman said Wednesday, while Schultz was suspended for three months. Both failed to meet multiple CFD policies about care.
But Ald. Raymond Lopez, 15th, said he feared, with new police misconduct cases potentially waning, that “we are opening ourselves up — as we have with other city-service related issues — to creating a new niche industry for lawyers who are quite literally now chasing ambulances to try to find ways in which to sue us as we start closing the chapter on police misconduct.”
But under questioning from Ald. Daniel La Spata, 1st, Mendenhall Casey noted the case would have been more defensible if the paramedics had followed policy and rendered care, noting there was “seven minutes, essentially, of unaccounted-for time.”
In the other case aldermen considered Wednesday, both Lee-Wilson and Wilson were pastors. Lee-Wilson was a longtime pastor at Body of Christ Deliverance Ministries, and Wilson was retired, according to media reports at the time.
The chase began when police Officer Wayne Ozmina, in an unmarked car, turned on his emergency lights to go through an intersection, according to reports.
Another driver, Rayvell Loften, sitting in a stolen rental car ahead of the officer at the light, thought he was being pulled over. He ran through a red light and sped away through several more, according to the suit by the family, and police followed. Loften reached a top speed of 69 mph, according to the Law Department.
Loften crashed into Yvonne and Adelbert’s car, killing them both, and got away.
The suit from their family alleges Ozmina was negligent for turning on his lights when there was no emergency, and for the pursuit that caused the accident.
The officer should not have turned on his emergency lights, the suit said, should have stopped the pursuit when the risk to other people outweighed the benefit of catching Loften, and didn’t follow CPD orders about when to continue a chase through residential areas.
The settlement passed without debate. Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, and Ald. Michelle Harris, 8th, both recused themselves from the vote because they said they knew the family.
Both settlements head to the full City Council for approval on Thursday.
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