Chicago taxpayers will be asked to pay $15.5 million to compensate two families who lost relatives because of alleged mistakes made by first responders.
The largest of the settlements before the City Council’s Finance Committee Wednesday, $8 million, would go to the family of Leonardo Guerrero, 44, who stopped breathing after being strapped to a stretcher in a Chicago Fire Department ambulance Aug. 31, 2022.
The Cook County medical examiner’s office ruled Guerrero’s death of cardiac arrest a homicide after determining that his fatal heart attack was caused in part by the physical restraints applied by paramedics. High blood pressure triggered by alcohol and cocaine use was a contributing factor, the medical examiner said.
The city’s liability for Guerrero’s death was heightened by the fact that the paramedic-in-charge was fired for failing to attend to the patient and allegedly trying to cover up his mistakes by falsifying his report about Guerrero’s death. Another paramedic was suspended.
The family’s lawsuit against the city accused the paramedics of arriving on the scene of a parking lot near Guerrero’s Buena Park home at around 2:35 a.m. to find Guerrero naked and in a state of physical and emotional duress, saying he was “going to die and experiencing labored breathing.”
The paramedics did not perform a physical examination, and did not take his vitals or patient history.
Instead, they told Guerrero to get up and required him to walk unassisted for 50 to 60 feet to an ambulance, where they handcuffed him, put him on a stretcher with a chest restraint and transported him to Thorek Hospital as he was “lapsing in and out of consciousness,” the lawsuit states.
Guerrero spent “five-to-six minutes” in the ambulance outside the hospital before the paramedic-in-charge loosened the chest restraint, checked Guerrero’s pulse for the first time and discovered that he had stopped breathing, according to the lawsuit.
By the time the second paramedic returned to the ambulance from inside the emergency room, Guerrero was in cardiac arrest with “ECG leads and a blood pressure cuff applied for the first time,” the lawsuit states. The paramedic-in-charge was performing CPR.
The falsified report was described in the lawsuit as erroneously claiming that Guerrero “just coded right as we pulled in” to the hospital parking lot; that the paramedic-in-charge had performed medical assessments and called Thorek Hospital three times prior to arriving; and that paramedics were the first to notice that a combative Guerrero had stopped breathing, when it was a police officer in the ambulance who noticed.
The Finance Committee will also consider authorizing a $7.5 million settlement to compensate the family of Adelbert and Yvonne Lee-Wilson.
The pastor and her husband were driving home from church in the Far South Side’s Pullman neighborhood in February 2022 when their car was struck by a driver being chased at high speeds by Chicago police. The Wilsons were killed in the collision.
According to the lawsuit, the officers initiated the pursuit without probable cause; continued the chase at dangerously high speeds without regard to conditions; ignored general orders restricting pursuits through residential areas; and failed to cut off the chase “when the risks to human life outweighed the benefits” of capturing the suspect.
Yvonne Lee-Wilson was 66 at the time of her death. Adelbert Wilson was 69.
Another settlement, for $950,000, would go to former Chicago police lieutenant-turned-whistleblower, Franklin Paz.
It would resolve a January 2021 lawsuit that claims Paz was dumped from the citywide Community Safety Team after he pushed back on “illegal” quotas that then-Deputy Chief Michael Barz set for traffic stops, arrests and other forms of police “activity.”
The unit’s roster included Officer Ella French, who was fatally shot while making a traffic stop in Englewood on Aug. 7, 2021. Her partner Carlos Yanez was seriously wounded during the stop.
According to the lawsuit, Barz told Paz that each officer he was supervising was expected to generate at least 10 “blue cards” every day, referring to the state-mandated documentation used to gather demographic information about people who are stopped. Paz was then demoted.
The settlement averts a civil trial that was expected to lay bare accusations that department leaders pushed quotas for traffic stops at the behest of former Chicago Police Supt. David Brown, who according to pretrial testimony in the case, called for 10,000 such stops each week and insisted the practice would build trust.
Contributing: Tom Schuba