June 29, 2023, and Henry Graham, a lost soul in one of America’s wealthiest neighborhoods, was strolling Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Again.
For years, Graham had ricocheted back and forth around Chicago, Evanston and South Bend, Indiana. He’d bounce from homeless shelters to jails, prisons and hospitals, the troubles in his head never fully addressed.
On a good day, he’d walk in to St. James Episcopal Cathedral near Huron Street and Wabash Avenue for some free food and a little camaraderie.
On a bad day, he’d get booted from the church for menacing its staff.
Since 2010, Graham has been charged with crimes 20 times and convicted of two felonies and seven misdemeanors, with most of the cases dropped and the convictions resulting in short sentences. Cops knew him but saw him as no more than a nuisance.
“Oh, yeah, I remember Henry,” one officer says, recounting a trespassing incident and some minor trouble on a CTA platform.
Then, on that warm June day two summers ago, the clock on the Wrigley Building showed 3:45 p.m., and Graham was about to spiral out of control.
Wearing a black hoodie and carrying a backpack, the then-49-year-old Graham ambled south on busy North Michigan Avenue, passing the massive Starbucks Reserve Roastery and the Swarovski jewelry store.
Walking ahead on the sidewalk was Russell Long, 53, toting a Neiman Marcus shopping bag. A vice president of Northern Trust Bank, Long lived in a high-rise overlooking the Chicago River near the Wabash Avenue bridge.
Two people who’d just walked out of Starbucks said Graham raced up behind Long in front of the Cartier store at 630 N. Michigan Ave. and punched him in the back of his head.
The 6-foot-3 Long pitched forward, falling hard onto the sidewalk on his face.
As Long lay semiconscious and bleeding profusely, the 5-foot-9 Graham sat down on a nearby fire hydrant, looking on as passersby rushed to help Long and call 911.
Gawkers gathered. And Graham left.
He walked a block south on Michigan Avenue. A witness ran ahead and flagged down two Chicago police officers sitting in a police vehicle.
Graham went over to the cops and admitted he punched Long, records show.
But neither they nor two other officers who were a block north, where paramedics were loading Long into an ambulance, arrested Graham — saying later that the semicomatose victim told them he didn’t know whether he wanted to press charges.
So Graham was left free to continue to roam the streets for the next three months and, authorities now say, to attack others.
Long ended up dying at Northwestern Memorial Hospital 13 days after he was attacked.
Shocking, unprovoked attacks
To try to understand the reasons behind a spate of shocking crimes in downtown Chicago between 2021 and 2024, the Chicago Sun-Times examined four unprovoked killings and two nonfatal attacks, including a bizarre assault on a flight attendant from Mexico. Most of the attacks happened during the day. The victims: people who were just going about their lives.
In each case, the people charged — two who’ve been convicted — had a history of serious mental illness or delusional behavior and had drifted in and out of jails and hospitals, sometimes for decades, their conditions never regularly treated.
Reporters pored over thousands of pages of police reports and court records, went to court hearings for a year for those who were charged, and interviewed family members, mental health experts, law enforcement authorities and government officials.
What emerged most clearly from this reporting is that there is no system in Chicago to identify — let alone to help — the small percentage of severely mentally ill and violent people who commit these crimes. In each of these cases, it was only when they have been accused of murder or some other terrible crime that they were put on regular mental health medication — a finding that experts say is troubling but not surprising.
Here’s what else we found:
- Despite stereotypes that some harbor, people battling severe mental illness are more likely to be victimized than commit crimes.
- For some who have slipped through the cracks for mental health care and been arrested, jail becomes society’s de facto safety net. Due to a lack of bed space at Illinois’ state-run psychiatric hospitals, dozens remain in custody at the Cook County Jail — many held there for months at a time — where they often cause disciplinary problems while not getting the level of psychiatric care the state hospitals would provide.
- Some could be helped by expanding the use of a legal process called outpatient civil commitment, in which a judge orders people with severe mental illness to be placed in supervised outpatient treatment if they’re deemed to pose a danger to themselves or others. Such an approach involves services that include providing housing, medication and psychiatric care that mental health advocates say would, in the long run, save money and lives.
- Repeat offenders who are mentally ill often are homeless or in unstable housing, making outreach difficult even if there were someone trying to keep tabs on and help them.
“Nobody is in charge of the mental health system in Illinois,” says Mark Heyrman, who works with the nonprofit Mental Health America and retired from the University of Chicago Law School after 41 years as a clinical professor specializing in mental health law. “You can’t find anyone who says that’s their job. That’s true in almost every state.”
Decades ago, as part of a deinstitutionalizion move, the vast majority of people with severe, lifelong mental illness were released from government mental institutions. That came in part as a reaction to civil rights abuses, but also because modern medicine was now able to help many of them live and function in their communities.
Since then, Illinois has lost most of its state psychiatric hospital beds. It now has about 1,200, compared with about 33,000 in the mid-1950s. But care outside of these institutions hasn’t kept up.
“There was not a corresponding shift of support to outpatient treatment of these individuals,” says Dr. Stephen Dinwiddie, chief of forensic psychiatry at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and former medical director of the state’s Elgin Mental Health Center.
“The emphasis continues [to be] on dangerousness rather than suffering, which has led to people ‘exercising their freedoms’ by being homeless, by being untreated and being victimized on the street,” Dinwiddie says. “People basically are now neglected up until the time that they become sufficiently annoying to the general population that police act and bring them in to the jail.”
This is happening at a time that federal funding for mental health support, which largely has come to states through Medicaid, increasingly is in question since the Trump administration’s push to cut federal aid overall.
While Illinois’ previous Medicaid expansion has helped cover low-income people who need private hospitalization, Medicaid reimbursement rates are lower than what Medicare or private insurance would pay. That’s prompted some hospitals to close their psychiatric units, meaning there are fewer places for people with an acute mental health crisis to go.
Even when people end up hospitalized, often they find they have nowhere to go for follow-up services after being discharged.
A safety net filled with holes
Graham can be viewed as an example of how the safety net in Illinois for homeless people with severe mental illness is full of holes for those at the highest risk of harming themselves or others, even when the warning signs are obvious and long-standing.
Tracking Graham’s early life was difficult. Sun-Times reporters couldn’t locate and reach any of his relatives. Court records say he got a general equivalency diploma after attending high school in northwest Indiana and spent most of his life in Cook County.
About 15 years ago, living in South Bend, he piled up misdemeanor arrests and convictions after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, a chronic condition in which people experience reality in an abnormal way. They might have delusions that others are plotting to harm them. They might hear and see things that don’t exist.
Records show Graham caught the attention of federal authorities in Indiana in July 2010 after making a false statement on a form while trying unsuccessfully to buy a gun at an Indiana gun store. Then 37 and battling his mental illness and drug abuse, Graham admitted he wanted a weapon because he was having trouble with people at the Hope Rescue Mission in South Bend, according to federal prosecutors.
He was sent to a federal mental institution in Massachusetts. But even there, while experiencing a paranoid delusion, he attacked another inmate and was deemed “grossly psychotic,” records show.
In October 2011, U.S. District Judge Robert L. Miller Jr. sentenced Graham to “time served” on the gun-buying charge because he’d already spent a year in custody. The judge noted Graham’s “inability to get on top of his mental illness” and said he appeared “more likely than most to commit further crimes. The risk is far less if he stays on his medication and under psychiatric care.”
The judge also said parole would be a challenge for Graham, “who rarely stays anywhere as long as three years.”
He was right: Graham repeatedly failed to live up to the conditions of his parole and got arrested three more times for threats and vandalism. He was imprisoned for two short stints, the last one in 2014.
Graham then moved to Cook County, where he became a familiar face to police in Chicago and Evanston. Five times before the attack on Long in June 2023, Graham was arrested for kicking, punching or threatening people.
Warning signs, more inaction
The victim in one of those arrests was Sarah Trujillo, a real estate leasing agent who says she was kicked by Graham in her leg and arm. She says Graham attacked her after she tried to help a woman he was sexually harassing on Feb. 14, 2023, in a crosswalk near the Daley Center in downtown Chicago.
Trujillo alerted the police, and Graham was charged with attacking her, but the case was dismissed on July 26, 2023. Court records don’t spell out why.
In an interview, she wept when told that Long was killed months after she was attacked.
Trujillo says she wanted her battery complaint to go to court and says the police and prosecutors never followed up with her.
“Nothing was done,” she says. “The charges were dropped, and I’m not really sure why. I called a couple times, left voicemails. But nobody ever called me back. I feel like, if the system actually worked, I feel like maybe he wouldn’t have killed someone. And I can’t help but feel that way.
“I really am sad about that.”
More attacks
In Evanston 10 days after Trujillo was attacked, Graham kicked another woman, police say.
A couple of weeks later, also in Evanston, he punched a man in his face and body on the Dempster Street platform of the CTA’s Purple Line, then screamed at the police officers who responded, threatening to kill their families, records show.
Two days before the attack on Long, police say he kicked a woman in her face near Chicago Avenue and State Street after asking whether she had a cellphone.
One of the cops who responded to the fatal attack on Long in June 2023 told investigators that he’d asked Long in the ambulance whether he wanted to sign a complaint against Graham, and when Long said, “I don’t know,” the officer let the matter drop, and Graham was allowed to go free.
In the days that followed the attack, Long’s friends gathered at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, where he was in intensive care, in a coma with brain bleeding and facial fractures.
His friends said they couldn’t believe the police hadn’t done anything. Janelle Keck, a longtime friend of Long, tries to imagine what the officers were thinking, why they didn’t even file a report.
“Without a report, it never happened. Then we can sweep it under the rug, and this guy just dies on life support, and the family goes back to rural Illinois or Arizona and just says, ‘Oh, well, life in the big city,’ ” Keck says.
On July 2, days after the attack, a friend who was visiting Long at the hospital called 911 and demanded action. An officer responded and filed a police report.
Four officers ended up being disciplined for violating department rules for infractions including not filing a report on the day of the attack. They served suspensions ranging from one to five days.
Finally charged in downtown killing
After the attack on Long, Graham continued to wreak havoc, according to police reports and court records that show he was arrested for trespassing at St. James Cathedral, his former hangout, from which he’d been banned; he threw a bottle through a salon window in Evanston; he pushed a man and a 14-year-old girl; and he bit and threatened to kill an Evanston police officer.
In Wrigleyville, he swung a broomstick and seriously wounded a man who’d refused to give him money, police say. The broomstick incident landed Graham in the Cook County Jail.
That’s where he was when prosecutors charged him with killing Long.
Since his arrest, Graham has had more than a dozen court hearings. Each time, he shuffles in to the courtroom from a holding area, accompanied by sheriff’s deputies. Some days, he looks like he’s wearing knickers because his long white tube socks are pulled up over his tan jail uniform. Other times, his hair is gathered into little balls on the back of his head.
At his first hearing, he was held in contempt of court and removed after shouting that Long had “pushed me first” and yelling, “I didn’t murder nobody.”
He told the judge, “Take me back to my cell; I don’t want to hear nothing!” and shouted “Welcome to America!”
An assistant public defender told the judge that Graham “does not present a danger to the community,” but the judge ordered Graham detained until trial.
Since then, Graham has mostly been quiet during his brief hearings, sometimes wishing the judge a good day.
In November 2023, the public defender’s office asked for an evaluation of Graham because he was exhibiting “mental health concerns,” including outbursts and physical aggressiveness. The judge hasn’t decided yet whether Graham is mentally fit to stand trial.
The Cook County public defender’s office declined to comment on his case.
People who have worked in psychiatric services for decades say much more needs to be done to find and treat the small number of mentally ill people who, like Graham, are homeless and have exhibited dangerous behavior.
Dinwiddie, the Northwestern doctor, says it will take a huge shift to move from viewing their actions as a crime problem to instead seeing them as a public health concern.
“Severely and persistently mentally ill [people] are much more likely to be victims rather than perpetrators of violent crime,” he says. “They need treatment, whether or not they’re going to ever commit a violent crime. By doing that, in a broad way, it will have the effect of decreasing violent crime by the tiny minority of the severely mentally ill that commit it.”
Betty Boggs, chief executive officer of Connection for the Homeless in Evanston, which runs a shelter where Graham stayed, would not talk about him, citing privacy concerns. But she says she agrees about the need for more mental health treatment and permanent housing.
“It’s not just about what happens to a person once they’re in that terrible spiral,” Boggs says. “It’s all the things that led up to that.”
Compassion and anger
The Rev. Steven Balke, pastor at St. James Episcopal Cathedral, knew Graham well.
“We would pray with him,” Balke says. “We would give him some shelter to stay and get out of the rain, get out of the heat.”
He says Graham was welcomed at St. James — until he threw some punches at people and was asked to leave.
“We weren’t equipped to be a robust mental health care system for him, to get him the help that he needed,” says Balke, who’s also a trainer for Mental Health First Aid, a program of the National Council for Mental Wellbeing.
Balke says that, early in his own life, he experienced homelessness, and he encouraged church members to help Graham.
“Henry was fine a lot of the time,” he says, “but occasionally was not. We tried for a good amount of time to work through [the] violent outbursts and to say, ‘You know, you’re welcome to be here. You can use our restroom, you can wash up, you can have a good time, [have] food, water, hang out here with us. But not when you’re being hostile toward other people who need this to be a welcoming place for them, too.’
“We ended up needing to call the police a couple of times just to say, ‘Hey, we need some help here. We have a person here who’s being violent beyond our ability to handle by ourselves.’ ”
Balke says he was stunned when he heard the news of Graham’s arrest for murder.
He sees what happened as a multilayered tragedy — for those, like Long, who were victimized and for their families and also for society and for people like Graham, who, he says, are ill, not evil.
“What if we had had some kind of mechanism put in place for Henry, to be able to say, ‘We know that you’re going to struggle with this. We know that you’re probably not going to be able to follow through on this court order. We’re going to take care of you. We’re going to put you in a place where you’ve got some stable housing, and you’ve got a counselor that you’ll be meeting with. If you need to be in some kind of a drug program, we’ll get you in that. We’ll provide you with education so you can go and get a job.’
“And he never would have ended up in this situation where he was hurting somebody else,” Balke says.
Keck, Long’s friend, agrees with Balke that society needs to address mental illness and homelessness.
But she’s also angry.
She had dated Long, whom she met years ago at the Empty Bottle bar in Ukrainian Village. They shared a love of live music and city life.
But she says: “We were better as friends. Here’s how to put it: He was Jerry Seinfeld. I’m Elaine, and we had a George, and together all of us were Kramers. You know, we had Kramer moments.”
Keck says Long, a native of downstate Dixon who lived in Chicago for decades, was the protector of their friend group, the guy they teasingly called “Batman” for constantly updating them on crime alerts he saw on the Citizen app.
He’d bought a condo on Wabash Avenue near the river, the perfect spot to walk to his job at Northern Trust. He’d pop in to Rossi’s, a bar on State Street where he’d play goofy music on the jukebox just to annoy the bartender, Keck says.
“He was, like, ‘I pay taxes. I pay for a good view. I want to walk. I want to enjoy this. I want to sip coffee and look at the river turn green every year and watch the dumb little ducks.’ ”
She says she still has a hard time processing that Long, always so vigilant, still ended up being killed for no reason.
“It doesn’t get more disgusting than that,” Keck says.
She says Long complained that, starting when the COVID-19 pandemic shut down businesses, it had gotten harder to go for a walk downtown without being harassed by people with obvious mental health issues.
“I don’t know what happened, where it changed, where we cross the streets instead of giving them money,” Keck says. “Instead of being passive and kind and understanding, we know that there’s a lot more under the surface that could harm us.”
She says, “I have no pity for the stories anymore. I’m done. You killed my friend.”
Keck says there’s one good thing that’s happened as a result of Long’s death, as small a consolation as it is: His friends have grown closer.
“They understand that life is short, and no matter how much money you make and how handsome you are, you’re still on the firing line,” she says. “So make the most out of your relationships while you’re here. And don’t take people for granted.”
