‘I just hope (my guy) is telling me the truth,’ is the feeling as Harvey’s missing gun saga takes another bizarre turn
By Lauren FitzPatrick
Staff writer
Heard this one yet?
Guy pulls a gun on Harvey police.
The .45 goes missing from police evidence.
The guy’s stepdad says the family bought the weapon back from police.
A detective is charged with a crime in connection with arranging the handoff.
Harvey’s mayor gets fingered as the one who gave the order.
The mayor’s new attorney denies any involvement.
The stepdad won’t say who sold him back the gun.
And if this convoluted story is not absurd enough already, now the young man busted in the gun case sits in the county lockup and denies in phone calls placed from the jail that he ever had a weapon.
What?
Even as competing agendas clash in Harvey’s missing gun case, and each of the players scrambles to add his spin, the truth is lurking.
But where?
“I ain’t had a gun from the jump,” a man who identified himself as Anthony Reynolds told the Daily Soutthown this week, days after felony charges were announced against the detective in charge of evidence. “(The cops are) trying to cover their jib.”
Reynolds claimed in a Wednesday phone call from Cook County Jail that on Oct. 18, 2005, Harvey police tried to shake him down for money. When he refused, Reynolds said, he got arrested and slapped with a gun charge. He said he also got slapped around by the officers. Cops say he resisted arrest.
Reynolds told the Southtown that had he really pulled a gun on a Harvey officer, he wouldn’t have lived to tell.Asked about the hullabaloo surrounding the missing weapon — his stepfather’s claims the .45-caliber brown and silver Remington was bought back from police — Reynolds defers to the stepfather, Larry Purnell.
Purnell recently was locked up on a federal drug charge.
Reynolds, 29, is slated for trial Monday on the gun case, in which he faces six to 30 years in prison. He’s also accused in the April shooting of Martell Edwards at a South Holland gas station. A .45-caliber handgun also killed Edwards, but no one has been able to say for sure if it’s the same weapon. If convicted, Renyolds could add a minimum of 45 years in
prison.
Last time he was in court, he asked prosecutors for a plea agreement in which he nearly took a 50-year prison term. But Cook County Circuit Judge Reginald Baker talked him out of such a hasty plea deal, and Reynolds agreed to go to trial.
Documents obtained by the Daily Southtown indicate Reynolds initially was accused of aggravated assault stemming from the Oct. 18 incident with police. He now is charged as an armed violent offender, a felony gun charge.
The same documents reveal that officers “used the necessary force to place the suspect into custody.”
One officer fired two shots in Reynolds’ direction; the other officer shot once at the suspect, the documents show. Reynolds was not hit, but a brown and white pit bull was shot and killed.
Purnell has told the Daily Southtown a Harvey police officer gave the gun back to his son and Purnell had nothing to do with the gun’s return.
He also said he didn’t know which Harvey officer made the sale, though it wasn’t Detective Hollis Dorrough, who was in charge of the weapon confiscated as evidence and now is charged in its disappearance.
Purnell also denied Mayor Eric Kellogg, his longtime friend, was involved in any way.
“Someone at the Harvey Police Department sold my son the gun back,” Purnell said. “You’ll have to ask my son. … We got the gun.”
Purnell was arrested Aug. 3 on a federal indictment accusing him of dealing crack cocaine.
After sources revealed Kellogg as “Public Official A,” who told Dorrough to give Reynolds back his “property,” Kellogg’s new attorney Sam Adam Jr., said the mayor is innocent.
“I can categorically tell you now, there is no evidence that can be presented, there is no evidence that will be presented and there is no evidence that exists that this mayor did anything wrong,” Adam told a crowd gathered at a Monday Harvey City Council meeting.
“All they’ve got is a lying copper,” he said, referring to Dorrough.
Cook County prosecutors insist they’ve got the story straight — and the evidence to back it up.
Their official version: In charging Dorrough last week, prosecutors said Dorrough entered a meeting with “Public Official A” in October, after Reynolds’ arrest, and was told to “help with the case and return property” to the defendant’s stepfather, whom Public Official A had known for years, Assistant State’s Attorney Joe Kosman said at Dorrough’s first court appearance.
Dorrough got a phone call a few days later from the stepfather asking when they could meet for a handoff, Kosman said. The .45 was then removed from the police station and handed over, Kosman said in court.
Kosman, who is leading the obstruction of justice case against Dorrough, wouldn’t comment specifically on the Harvey investigation.
But the veteran prosecutor would say that ascertaining any semblance of truth from complex cases takes heaps of inquiry.
“You have to just keep digging and just corroborate it with other things,” he said. “Really, when you talk to somebody, how do you judge it?”
Bingo, other attorneys in the case say. The hardest part in the case is divining truth from such absurdity.
As one of them whispered, “I just hope (my guy) is telling me the truth.”
Southtown legal affairs writer Lauren FitzPatrick may be reached at lfitzpatrick@dailysouthtown.com or (708) 633-5964.
