Reporting like this all along

This was just a whatever story.

I mean, the announcement was a good one for everyone living along the train line, but nothing spectacular in terms of reporting. Metra advocates (including the recently deceased Phil Pagano) met at the Oak Lawn station on a Monday to announce there’d be more weekend service.

I wrote a respectable news story that was printed the next day, March 3, 2009. I used recordings of the speeches to check the quotes.

But listen! I also stopped while walking away from the station to record the sound of the train.

Why? Why bother for a little news story that wasn’t going to get any multimedia? Why take the time?

Because it sounded amazing. That’s why. Why go to a train station to talk about trains, and never listen to the rumble and whistle and breathing?

Listen: metra-train approaches

May I have your attention please? The next outbound train from Chicago is now arriving at your station. Please stand behind the yellow line until the train comes to a complete stop before boarding.

Here’s a chunk of the story. I hear you all like something to look at as you listen.

Way down at the end of Metra’s SouthWest Service Line, some 50 miles from Chicago’s Loop, commuters are plunking down roots in a charming bedroom community called Manhattan.

And as Manhattan has grown – the population has at least doubled since 2000 – so have the calls for more train service from Mayor William Borgo. On Monday, Borgo was thrilled to hear that better rail service to Manhattan was coming faster than springtime.

Metra is adding daytime trains to the schedule servicing the end of the SouthWest Line and Saturday service at every stop on the tracks to Chicago starting March 21, the transit agency announced Monday.

A midday inbound and outbound train will extend to the Laraway Road station in New Lenox and the Manhattan station, making all stops up the line to Chicago’s Union Station, Carole Doris, Metra board chairwoman, told a group of southwest suburban mayors and U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski (D-3rd), of Western Springs.

“Weekend service is going to be a great benefit, especially during these tough economic times. You can’t beat how cheap it is to get downtown,” Lipinski said. “It’s a benefit not just to get to Chicago and get back home, but to get places all along this line.”

Excerpts from a story published March 3, 2009, in the SouthtownStar newspaper on page A3, and audio recorded on March 2, 2009 at the Oak Lawn station on 95th Street.

‘Families closer to Burr Oak settlement’

Hundreds of families that sued the owner of Burr Oak Cemetery in the wake of a grave- reselling scandal could share in a $7 million insurance settlement.

But how much relatives who lost family graves in the historic black cemetery near Alsip could recoup has yet to be determined. Some of the money is also earmarked to make improvements at Burr Oak.

U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Pamela S. Hollis has approved a settlement that routes $7 million in insurance money to Burr Oak and $150,000 to Cedar Park Cemetery in Calumet Park, Howard Korenthal, a court-appointed reorganization specialist who has been overseeing
Burr Oak, said Tuesday.

The insurance money will be paid out once Hollis approves a bankruptcy reorganization plan for the cemeteries’ owner, Perpetua.

The plan is still being negotiated, Korenthal said.

It’s too early to know how much of the Burr Oak money will be used to improve cemetery conditions and how much will be split among relatives, said Larry Rogers Sr., who represents hundreds of plaintiffs. But the settlement is an important step, he said.

“It means we’re moving toward a resolution of the problem,” Rogers said. “It’s a long process.”

Dozens of lawsuits rolled in within days of the July 2009 news that Burr Oak’s manager and three employees allegedly had dug up remains to resell burial plots. Perpetua filed for bankruptcy reorganization in September.

Perpetua recently closed on the sale of Cedar Park to south suburban Cemecare LLC.

Cemecare’s owners – Willie Carter, of Restvale Cemetery, and Lafayette and Marguerite Gatling – also intend to buy Burr Oak once the insurance settlement is finalized.

As published in the SouthtownStar, July 28, 2010.

Pelican

Poynter orders form last week’s class: Go find a scene. Write it up. See what you bring back. Don’t spend forever on it, just write:

High in Florida’s azure over the basin on this summer afternoon, there are few cirrus interruptions.

Jets sail to their destinations half a mile up. Propeller planes buzz gently across the sky, mapping a line out to the bay past the glassy surface below.

The tallest sailboat barely bobbles where she’s tethered to the docks. Her sleek fiberglass gleams white. Her chrome rails glide around her hull. She’s in from Tampa. They call her Patience.

A splashy mess wrecks a fine silence.

Someone falling off the edge? The dumping of a corpse? Does anyone need help?

He falls alright, this muddy pelican. He crashes hard through the line separating his sky from his sea.

He falls like a drunk, late in the afternoon, thrashed as if seized. His fingered wings splay.

Around him, as he flails, the water froths.

I saw a pelican once before in pictures my Pop sent from his house in North Port. And I saw other local birds my grandfather the snowbird knew would amuse us.

He loved Florida. He napped topless in the sun. When he awoke, he swilled a cheap brewski, or three.

Then as he was trimming a neighbor’s tree, his able brown body gave out.

We flew, in the months after his stroke, to see him in a Tampa rehab. We found his beer belly deflated, his words garbled.

His leathered brown skin faded into the pallor of someone else’s grandfather.

Hi Pop! It’s me! I’m so glad you’re ok!

He smiled with the left of his face.

He needed a haircut, a shave. The nurses only bathed him. My brother wielded electric clippers, then attacked Pop’s toenails.

Between the rehab and his junk-filled house, my mother drove his minivan, the Dodge that still smelled like Pop’s bitey little dog and stale coffee. She chose the Sunshine Skyway Bridge over inland routes.

My sister swapped turns with me in the front seat.

In the back, I fought a gut sickened, I told myself, by the ride.

Out the wide side window leggy herons poked along the shoreline.

Then a big guy with a brown back, a beak bumpy underneath bumbled by. More of them floated a minute on the air. Shed any grace. Crash bombed toward the surf and pulled up at the last minute, sometimes pulled up too late.

One gulped down something that struggled in its mouth.

I craned my neck to confirm: Birds of the absurd! Florida birds! Pelicans!

Pelicans.

My pelican in the basin uprights himself on the water. Jams his pocketed beak under his wing. Roots around a while.

He flaps up to a pile to preen some more. He rolls his head around, stretching out a stumpy neck. He jiggles the flab of his famed pouch from side to side, as a pooch pants, to cool himself.

Baking in the late afternoon, he falls asleep.

Narrative exercise from a secondhand store

‘Go find a story,’ came the edict Monday. Doesn’t have to be news. Ok, so I went to a place in a strange city I could be myself in: A little secondhand store. Followed the rules. Listened carefully. Looked at everything. Wrote in about an hour.

Here’s what I had:

“Young lady, everything in here’s negotiable,” a kind voice beckoned from inside the dark storefront.

Only Liberace, resting on one of two gold embroidered love seats, already proved a bargain for a coupla bucks. Ditto for Anita Bryant and Nat King Cole singing your Christmas hits on tape for two quarters. A full smoke glass barset cost $12, according to its hand-markered sign.

Head all the way back, the man urged. The good stuff goes all the way to the back.

So past the gilded dishes and lacquered cabinets, down a hall of sheets-for-a-dollar, the ratty brown carpet turns to concrete, as Lou Rusnak’s second-hand store opens into his workshop.

Fixing furniture gives you something to do. Because you can’t make a living out of selling old stuff like this, not anymore. Not since a developer gutted the shopper’s block for condos that never came. $1,500 a month won’t feed a family. But the few hundred dollars a month come in handy so long as social security pays the bills for your 73-year-old self and your wife.

It was all his wife’s idea then. She had a yen for old things and started selling second-hand clothing, jewelry, linens in the storefront next door, the one now papered over. Her husband added furniture and housewares he found at yard sales or estates he could polish up a little and resell.

Lou didn’t learn about furniture as a cop. Or in the service. It was just something he picked up in his middle years after he left Kansas-City-Kansas for Florida more than 25 years ago.

Wooden furniture’s not like the junk you buy today. It takes to repairs. You can strip and sand it, stain it again. Give it a seal. Sell it.

Look at this open drawer. See that tongue and groove work? That means if you drop this dresser and the drawer breaks, you can fix it.

Lou can fix it anyway.

Last weekend, he refinished a 1950s wooden dresser made in Vermont that’d been lost under a dark finish. Now the light maple gleams in the sun outside and you can see the dowels that hold this little beauty together. You’ll never guess what shined up the brass pulls?

Ketchup.

The dresser was deemed worth the time for the $50 Lou’s asking. So was an East Lake upholstered rocker built before 1900 and a 1930s dining table with three leaves.

Most other stuff’s better off painted. A lady dropped off a little country kitchen set that’ll want a quick sanding and a quart of paint before returning to use.

This morning at 8 when “Talk of the Town” opened its doors, Lou primed the chairs for a few hours. Tomorrow they get a new white coat. Then a second. They’ll be ready for dinner Thursday.

There’s no rush. There are barely customers before lunchtime anyway, no one besides a box fan to break the silence his antiques keep.

By closing time today, Lou had kept his white shorts and sneakers tidy, and his forehead somehow free of sweat.

For eight hours’ work, he’d sold two cassette tapes, including the Anita.

“That‘ll be a dollar, young lady,” Lou said, ignoring his own sign about seven percent sales tax.

He headed back outside to Central Avenue with an upright dolly to wobble the Vermont maple back in for the night.

Poynter!

I got to come to the Poynter Institute to polish my writing. Got accepted in the Narrative Writing on a Deadline class taught by these fine folks. Five intense days of learning = my idea of happiness.

Just in time, too. I need some help these days. And the three stories I brought, to talk about my unedited writing are recent favorites.
Love Dad.
Wyoming (which I somehow can’t find).
And Crash Night.

As a group tonight of writers, we agreed to keep what we talk about in session to ourselves. But I don’t think I’m spilling the beans to say I was struck by everyone’s commitment to storytelling. Not just reporting or writing. But telling a good story in the right way.

There is power in a good story. And I should just start writing already.

‘Deadly crash: the unfolding of a tragedy’

Editor’s note: Since the May 10 crash that claimed the life of Michael Langford Jr., the SouthtownStar has reported on the unfolding charges and public outcry. Now, using newly released reports and phone tapes from Steger police, SouthtownStar reporter Lauren FitzPatrick is able to tell this story of the night that would end one young life and change the course of several others.

Sgt. Gerald Ruff was well into an overnight shift on a cool, dry Sunday night in May when the call came in to the Steger Police Department.

Car crash. Landed in yard. Someone’s calling for help.

He found the little red car that had busted through a cyclone fence and swiped one tree before planting itself in another one along a flat stretch of road in Steger.

A veteran cop, he knew enough to recognize the signs.

Ruff heard the screams before he reached the car.

“Help, get my kid help!”

First: Call for an ambulance.

Then: Assess the damage.

Ruff called for paramedics.

The Chevy still was running. Its windshield wipers were humming along, though there was no rain. The air bag had blown. The driver’s door was stuck, so the driver yelled through his half-open window.

The man was twisted, yelling out for help, reaching for a child in the back seat.

The little boy was strapped upright in his booster seat. His eyes were closed, his head slumped over.

He wasn’t moving.

“You got to help him,” the driver begged, blood trickling from his own scalp.

Ruff promised the ambulance was on its way.

Then the driver stopped pleading and told the sergeant: “Go get the bastard who did this. Some guy in a silver car cut me off. Go get him.”

Some Hispanic guy waving a gun was now speeding toward Chicago Heights in a little silver car, the man said. He himself had just been at 7-Eleven.

As Ruff listened to the story, he quickly discerned: No way. Chicago Heights wasn’t in the right direction.

The sirens neared. Ruff leaned in to the man, telling him help had arrived. He watched the guy’s blank stare and caught a whiff of booze.

Young, he thought. And drunk.

Were you drinking, Ruff asked. Did you take any drugs?

“No.”

Ruff and the property owner on 34th Street helped the driver out of the car, sat him on the porch.

Holding his head, the man asked about his “son.”

So Ruff changed the subject with a volley of questions. What is your name? Your birthdate? Where do you live?

Cecil Conner Jr., 22, managed to answer. Except he bungled his home address. Then he lost his balance and rolled backward.

Out in the yard, firefighter paramedics pulled up and swarmed the crushed car.

Conner didn’t know it yet, but the news was grim.

The boy is dead, firefighters told Ruff.

Paramedics rushed off to St. James Hospital,  the lifeless little body in the ambulance.

Conner was bleeding a little and complained his head and neck hurt. But he’d live.

Minutes later, Ruff officially learned what he’d already radioed back to Steger PD: Five-year-old Michael Langford Jr. didn’t make it.

The situation was about to get worse, Ruff already seemed to know.

This story had been set in motion less than one hour earlier. That’s when, only a few miles down the road, a Chicago Heights patrolman had swapped out a sober driver for a drunk one.

‘This is going to get ugly’

Kathie LaFond knew she’d be driving.

Her boyfriend, Cecil Conner, had been on the booze for days. He’d smoked weed, pounded shots and swilled beer all day long.

So when they met up at a party at his cousin’s with her little boy in tow, the 23-year-old mother didn’t touch a drop.

It was a little after 11:30 then, late on a Sunday night.

Three hours later, they were heading home, little Michael buckled in his safety seat.

She’d driven only blocks of the 2-mile ride when she saw the flashing lights.

The cop said she hadn’t used her turn signal and found her license was suspended. Chicago Heights patrolman Chris Felicetti had to take her in.

She told him to give Conner the keys. She didn’t tell the officer Conner had been drinking. Neither did Conner.

So Felicetti checked her passenger’s license. He didn’t smell any booze on Conner, either. So he sent the man and boy back onto the road.

Conner called his cousin, who asked him back out to the party.

But Conner decided to take Michael to his own home in Steger, on Barbara Lane.

Less than half a mile from home, he swerved off the road and into a tree.

Word of the crash that killed a little boy spread. Steger cops ran the Chevy’s plates, saw it got pulled over half an hour earlier.

The police radio blew up with chatter.

Really, Steger police wondered to each other, Chicago Heights didn’t smell anything?

How?

“You can just smell how strong the alcohol is,” Ruff told a colleague from the hospital. “They let him drive. This is going to get ugly.”

Steger’s dispatcher contacted Chicago Heights.

“You guys ran a vehicle, let’s see here, on a Kathie LaFond and Cecil Conner,” Steger asked a female dispatcher.

“Yes.”

“You got any information on what you ran ‘em for?”

“It was a traffic stop.”

“Was it Cecil?” Steger said.

“It was LaFond.”

“Was Cecil in the vehicle or no?”

“Cecil was in that vehicle because we ran him, didn’t we, Nance? The LaFond traffic stop? Yeah.”

“Ah, OK.”

“Why, what’s going on?”

“Well, he crashed a car and a 5-year-old is deceased.”

“Ah! Oh, my God. HE crashed the car,” she said.

“Yep.”

“That baby is dead,” she said to whomever else was with her.

The dispatcher turned around and called Felicetti:

“When you did that traffic stop with that LaFond chick, was anyone in the car with her?” she said. “When you arrested LaFond, was Cecil in that vehicle with her?”

“Cecil showed up later on,” he replied.

“Cecil showed up later on?”

“Why?”

“That accident in Steger. Was there a kid in that car when you stopped it?”

“Yes, there was. … “

“He crashed the car at 34th and Carpenter,” the dispatcher said. “Steger just called. Why did we run (the plate)?”

“OH, MY GOD. He was all right when I turned it over to him.”

“He was in the vehicle? Or he showed up.”

“No, no, he was in the vehicle. He was in the passenger’s side. He had a valid driver’s license. And the kid was secured safely in the child seat.”

“Well, that baby is deceased.”

There’s a pause, about as long as a long breath in, then:

“Oh, my God.”

Felicetti then called Steger police himself.

“Terrible, I feel like sh*t,” he was caught saying on the phone before a male voice in Steger spoke up.

“I’m calling in reference to a car accident you had in your town,” Felicetti started the conversation, as the man on the other end kept affirming.

Yes.

“Where a child has been killed.”

OK.

“Earlier, I conducted a traffic stop on the car, the driver of the vehicle was suspended. I turned it over to the passenger of the car, who had a valid driver’s license.”

OK.

“He was unaware that she was suspended.”

OK.

“As was she. I was just calling to see. Actually, my dispatchers advised me to call you guys.”

Then the dispatcher begins some questions:

“Let’s see here. You’re officer … how do you spell your last name?”

He spelled it. Gave his badge number.

Dispatch asked him: “Do you know who the passenger was in the vehicle?”

Felicetti answered: “Cecil Jr. Let me see what his last name was real quick. Connie, Conner.”

“Conner? OK.”

Felicetti says: “He was the one driving the vehicle?”

The dispatcher begins to answer: “I believe so.” But then catches himself and changes course: “I have no idea. We’re just, we’re just trying to piece everything together. So I’m just waiting for the officers on scene to come in here to give it any further. So. But what I’ll do is as soon as one of the officers come in, I’ll have them give you a call and that way they can give you further, so.”

Felicetti’s voice dropped. “OK.”

The conversation’s nearly over.

“OK, sir?”

“Thank you,” Felicetti answers.

“No problem.”

His voice is quiet. “Bye.”

The dumbfounded driver

Cecil Conner was strapped to a hospital bed at St. James in Chicago Heights, fighting with ER nurses.

It was not quite 4 a.m.

He still reeked of booze. He couldn’t talk right. He didn’t know the little boy who called him “Dad” was dead.

So Det. Peter Fajman arrested him for driving under the influence while his arms and legs were tied down.

Conner refused a draw of his blood that would test it for alcohol and drugs, but Fajman and the ER nurse persisted.

By 4:45 a.m., Conner appeared too drunk and fazed from the crash for an interrogation. He was still on a backboard, his neck in a collar, his eyes bloodshot.

He kept asking why he was restrained. Insisted he hadn’t done anything wrong.

He was just taking Michael to get something to eat, he insisted.

That’s when, he told the detective, a Hispanic guy waving a gun chased him in a silver Impala – just after he drove off from that Chicago Heights police stop.

When the detective returned to Conner’s room, his nose told him the story even before he saw the urine pooled under the bed.

Lab results came back saying the 22-year-old’s blood-alcohol content measured .208, between two and three times the legal limit. And there was evidence he’d been smoking marijuana, too.

Meanwhile, Fajman tracked down Michael’s mom.

And St. James released Conner to Steger police.

In the back of a squad car, Conner kept asking what went wrong. Why was he arrested? What had he done?

At 10 a.m. in a Steger holding cell, Conner passed out, sleeping it off until after 3 p.m.

Fajman roused him, took him to another room, read him his Miranda rights.

Conner began his story of partying at his cousin’s house since Friday, drinking and smoking weed, and ended the interview with his plan:

When LaFond was arrested, Conner thought he’d take the child to his own home in Steger.

He never told the officer he’d been drinking.

He started driving. Doesn’t remember the roads he took. Swerved to avoid a semi-truck coming at him.

There was never any gunman in a silver car.

The last thing Conner remembered was hitting a tree.

And then he blacked out.

A day after Michael died, Conner would face a judge.

Now, two months later, he remains behind bars in the Will County Jail, charged with aggravated driving under the influence.

He maintains his innocence.

INFORMATION, PLEASE

The SouthtownStar has also asked Chicago Heights police for reports and radio calls from the same night. A city attorney denied the request, citing an “ongoing investigation” in the matter. The newspaper is appealing the denial with the Illinois Attorney General.

Published in the SouthtownStar, July 18, 2010, on page 12.
Page 2010-07 Deadly crash || SouthtownStar

‘Police report disputes mom’s version of events preceding fatal crash’

Not only did a Chicago Heights woman fail to tell police her boyfriend had been drinking when he drove her car with her little son in the back, but she also told the officer to let him drive, according to police reports obtained Thursday by the SouthtownStar.

Within a half-hour of Kathie LaFond’s arrest in Chicago Heights about 2:30 a.m. May 10, where she was stopped and cited for driving without a valid license, her boyfriend wrapped her car around a tree in Steger. Her 5-year-old son, Michael Langford Jr., strapped into a booster seat in the back, was killed.

LaFond has contended in a lawsuit that Chicago Heights police let Cecil Conner drive away from the traffic stop even though she told the officer Conner had been drinking. Conner is charged with aggravated driving under the influence and remains in the Will County jail.

But in detailed crash reports and police dispatch audio recordings obtained by the SouthtownStar under the Freedom of Information Act, LaFond told Steger police detective Peter Fajman another story about what had happened in Chicago Heights.

“She told the officer to let Cecil drive. She did not tell the officer Cecil had been drinking,” Fajman wrote of his interview with LaFond, which took place about four hours after the crash.

Chicago Heights police department have that LaFond told the officer about Conner’s drinking and reiterated that there was no indication during the stop that Conner was drunk.

The Chicago Heights officer also told Steger police he didn’t detect any alcohol on Conner, according to radio dispatch recordings. Steger Sgt. Gerald Ruff radioed a colleague from the hospital where Conner had blood drawn and Michael was pronounced dead.

As first to arrive at the crash scene, Ruff had documented Conner’s behavior after the crash, including how he flubbed his own address, stunk of alcohol and fell over backward while waiting for ambulances.

“He’s gonna be at least twice if not triple the limit,” Ruff said, referring to Conner’s blood-alcohol content. “He’s in a room with a neck brace on, his face is all black and blue. You can just smell how strong the alcohol is there. This is gonna get ugly.”

LaFond’s attorney, Mark Horwitz, said that by the time Steger police wrote their reports, they already understood the repercussions Chicago Heights police could face if they let a drunk man drive a car containing a child.

“Steger might be covering for them, too,” Horwitz said. “Of course that’s what they’re going to say. We have something on the tape that says, ‘We’re sitting in a room right now and (Conner) stinks of alcohol.’ They know something’s going to happen.”

As published in the SouthtownStar, July 16, 2010, on page 4.

‘Village secretary accused of plying teens with booze for sex

It started with an apology posted on Facebook by a young teen to a female friend for what she had seen him doing with her mom.

Now the mother stands accused of molesting him and three more of her daughter’s 14- and 15-year-old male friends.

Cathleen M. Miller, 40, a longtime secretary for the village of Chicago Ridge and mother of three daughters, plied the teens with alcohol and marijuana and had sexual intercourse with two of them, prosecutors said.

Miller can’t have any contact with her 14-year-old daughter, her oldest, her attorney said, because the girl witnessed some of the alleged sex acts between her mom and the boys.

Miller, of 5813 W. 109th St., remained in jail Wednesday night, facing three counts of criminal sexual assault and one count of criminal sexual abuse.

Her alleged victims are four boys whom she molested in her home between February and June, said Andy Conklin, a spokesman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.

Bail was set at $900,000 Tuesday in Cook County Circuit Court in Bridgeview, Conklin said. Miller’s attorney, Robert Olson, said she likely will not make bail.

Olson said Miller denies any wrongdoing and said her daughter’s friends brought their own alcohol and drugs to her home.

She recently separated from her husband and had gotten an order of protection against him for herself and their daughters after a June 6 incident in their home. She claimed a long history of physical and emotional abuse and had consulted Olson about filing for divorce, he
said.

Miller said her husband in June had “spit in her face, poured water on her and pushed her to the ground,” scraping her left knee, according to court documents.

The sexual abuse came to light several weeks ago after one of the boys wrote an apology to Miller’s eldest daughter on Facebook, Olsen said. The girl had walked in on them. His parents saw the message and went to police, he said.

As police started asking questions, Cathleen Miller checked herself into the hospital. She was considering suicide, Olson said. That’s when her sister took custody of the 14-year-old and her siblings, ages 3 and 10.

Deputy Police Chief Paul Landry would only say that Miller had worked for the village for at least 20 years but declined further comment.

Longtime Mayor Eugene Siegel did not return messages left at his office and home.

Kendall Marlowe, a spokesman for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, said his office was investigating the family.
*

Published in the SouthtownStar, July 15, 2010, on page 3.

‘It’s English only in Homer Township’

Update, July 18: How is this still the most commented story on www.southtownstar.com?

I caught this little story because my head was up. Lots of people are on vacation; the newsroom is pretty desolate anymore. I honestly didn’t know it would take off the way it did. The resolution, whether you agree with it or not, doesn’t… do anything.

BY LAUREN FITZPATRICK

Homer Township, whose leaders admit has no illegal immigration problem, voted Monday might to declare English the official language for its 25,000 residents.

A month after the same resolution failed, all three trustees who turned up to the meeting, voted to adopt a resolution that also supports current residency requirements for schools and upholds federal immigration laws, clerk Steve Balich said.

“Homer Township Board recognizes that there most likely (is) no serious problem with illegal immigration, in the Township, but wants to make it policy to enforce the rule of law in Homer Township,” the resolution read.

The resolution acknowledges English to be “the dominant language of Homer Township.”

“It has nothing to do with race,” Balich said Tuesday. “It has to do with the law and whether or not a person is a legal immigrant.

“I don’t consider it wasting time,” he said of the resolution he has acknowledged the township doesn’t have the authority to enforce.

The sponsoring township trustee, Vicki Bozen, said illegal immigration costs taxpayers money to educate undocumented children and print official information in foreign languages. She said she was motivated in part by Arizona’s new law, slated to be implemented later this month, that would require state and local police to question and possibly arrest illegal immigrants during the enforcement of other laws such as traffic stops.

“Illegal immigrants cost taxpayers dollars and we need to do something about it,” she said after the June 7 meeting in which the resolution initially failed.

Two trustees, one of whom voted against the reolution last time, did not attend Monday’s meeting. Bozen, township supervisor Pam Meyers and Christina Neitzke, who previously opposed it, voted in favor.

The Homer School District 33C already requires three forms of documentation to prove residency, according to the superintendent, adding he has had few residency violations in his schools that draw from Lockport, Homer Glen, New Lenox and unincorporated areas.

ps- Story also made the Sun-Times. Was the centerpiece story online for a day, too.

And this thing The Daily Caller (second page): It’s English only in Homer Township | The Daily Caller

‘Can new laws prevent another Burr Oak heartbreak?’

BY LAUREN FITZPATRICK
If Lorna Maxey thought anyone would take care of the pitted roads all those years she bumped along at Burr Oak Cemetery, she’d have made a complaint any of the times she went to visit her 26 relatives who lay at rest there.

“I guess I could have complained, but it was like that for so long, after a while, you think, there isn’t somebody to complain to,” Maxey said. “(Groundskeepers) work here every day, they see this. If nothing’s getting done, maybe nothing can be done.”

Families who lamented the shoddy conditions at Burr Oak usually got nowhere. They complained about relatives’ bodies being double – stacked or thrown out when their graves’ lease term expired or about paying cash for plots that allegedly landed in the pocket of the cemetery’s former manager.

There were scant regulations before, said Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, whose office uncovered the grave-reselling allegations.

“No agency had blueprints. No agency had a list of recent burials,” Dart said. “We found there was no place for people to go to. People who had complained for years, got looked at like crackpots, and turned out to be right.”

But the Cemetery Oversight Act passed in the year since the grave – reselling scandal broke aims to prevent the heartbreak and tragedy that unfolded a year ago at Burr Oak, the major players say, if properly enforced.

New rules implemented March 1 will consolidate cemetery oversight under the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulation.

They give cemetery clients a written price list and contract when they purchase graves, department head Brent Adams said. They mandate good conditions for cemetery grounds, too.

All complaints – whether about shady financial dealings or merely unkempt grass – will be collected via a hotline. Each will open an investigation; disciplinary action could lead to license suspensions and fines up to $10,000 for each infraction.

Cemetery managers and some employees must carry a license similar to that required for funeral directors, he said. Fees are expected to pay for up to 30 new employees who will investigate and prosecute claims.

And the department will track every burial in the state in a database and license private non-religious cemetery owners and employees. The database software is designed to kick up red flags if the number of burials at a cemetery drastically falls in a month, or if multiple burials are assigned to the same grave, he said. And a $1.50 to $2 fee per burial pays for the database, Adams said.

Since March 1, about 30 residents and dozens of cemetery owners have called the hotline with questions, said department spokeswoman Sue Hofer.

The new law reads well for consumers and will rank among the best nationwide, said Josh Slocum, head of the watchdog organization Consumer Funeral Association, but only if it gets enforced.

“The law itself doesn ‘ t magically stop misbehavior and no regulatory agency can police every single transaction. But it’s going to require the state to invest in the necessary staff to do a reasonable audit of these cemeteries every year – thoroughly investigating and following up on consumer complaints,” he said.

Some of the owners call the new regulations burdensome, saying the licensing and continuing education requirements will devour profits.

“None of us want to be regulated because it raises the cost of doing business, it’s stressful,” said Victoria Hand, who owns Washington Memory Gardens in Homewood. “The consumer’s going to have to pay more for a burial.”

Cemetery licenses will likely start at $100, plus another $50 for every cemetery manager and customer service employee – good and bad alike.

Besides, she said, Burr Oak’s horrors began as financial wrongdoing. A manager who noticed accounting discrepancies took the books to the police, who then discovered piles of bones, caskets and broken vaults. When police started asking questions, an employee described the grave-reselling scheme.

“As far as preventing Burr Oak, no, there’s nothing that could have prevented Burr Oak,” she said. “The only way (police) found out anything was going on was a whistleblower.”

Roman Szabelski, the head of Catholic Cemeteries of Chicago who’s helped oversee Burr Oak’s maintenance for about the last year, said checks and balances will halt a future scandal.

“The key to the whole issue is good supervision,” he said. “You have to have people in place you can trust who are going to do what’s right. You always are going to have the possibility of evil people doing evil things.”

Though religious cemeteries like his are exempt from the licensing, they’ll have to enter new burials in the database and provide customers with written price lists and contracts. Catholic Cemeteries already requires background checks for employees.

Szabelski called the majority of the new rules – especially posting price lists – “good business sense.” But he’s frustrated at how slowly the law’s provisions are unfolding.

“All cemeteries have to register, but the forms don’t exist yet. We have to create names of everyone interred since March 1, but the database doesn’t exist yet,” he said.

Read complete coverage of the Burr Oak Cemetery scandal as it unfolded at www.southtownstar.com/burr-oak

WHAT’S IN THE NEW LAW

The Cemetery Oversight Act includes a toll-free help line for complaints about cemeteries, 1-888-RLOVED1 (756-8331) and a Consumer Bill of Rights.

Consumers also now are entitled to:

• Protection from deceptive or unfair practices by the cemetery.

• A standardized price list disclosing prices for all cemetery related products, and a receipt for any services purchased.

• A burial contract that describes the exact location of the burial and lists contact information for the cemetery manager.

• Notification that the term limit for a grave is about to expire

For the first time, cemetery owners must keep cemetery grounds reasonably maintained to the standards of inspectors from the Department of Financial and Professional Regulation. Cemetery managers and customer service personnel also must:

• Acquire licenses similar to those already held by funeral directors and embalmers.

• Pass a background check.

• Undergo continuing education.

• Risk paying a fine of up to $10,000 per infraction if found in violation of the Cemetery Oversight Act by the state. Among prohibited activities: unprofessional conduct, charging for services not rendered and failure to maintain the cemetery grounds.