With her sentencing day nearing, a former North Side elementary school principal who stole nearly $300,000 from the Chicago Public Schools told her attorneys that she’d already experienced the worst days of her life, and that she’d “get through this, too.”
Sarah Jackson Abedelal said she had “good days and bad days.” She said she was “learning to cope” with what happened at Brennemann Elementary School. And she insisted that, “at some point, it’s got to go away.”
“Brennemann saved my life,” Abedelal told her lawyers in January.
But, she added, “I screwed up at Brennemann.”
Four months later, defense attorney Jonathan Bedi walked into court for Abedelal’s sentencing hearing Wednesday. But when he stepped to the bench, he told the judge that Abedelal, 61, had died.
Bedi didn’t elaborate. Abedelal was pronounced dead at 4:05 p.m. Tuesday in the 19100 block of Pine Drive in Country Club Hills, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office. The cause and manner of death were pending Wednesday.
Abedelal’s sentencing hearing had earlier been scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Tuesday.
“Despite the charges in her case, Sarah positively impacted the educational journeys of hundreds of students,” Bedi said in a written statement. “While charges resulted in Sarah’s plea of guilty, this single chapter did not define her. She was a wonderful friend and family member. Sarah will be deeply missed by her family, friends and colleagues.”
One neighbor said she saw Abedelal sitting in her car outside her Woodlawn home around midday Tuesday, and she seemed “fine.”
“I didn’t notice a problem or anything wrong,” said Carlas Prince, who lives a few houses down from Abedelal’s home. “She’s always been quiet and kept to herself.”
Prince, a real estate broker, said she recently showed Abedelal’s home to a client. “The houses here sell fast, and hers was beautiful,” Prince said. “I knew about her legal issues but I never really got to know her.”
Another neighbor, who lives across the street, said Abedelal kept to herself. “I was sorry to hear the news,” she said. “I only saw her a handful of times. … I don’t know if she was embarrassed about her troubles or if that was just her personality.”
The news ended roughly 24 hours of uncertainty about Abedelal’s whereabouts. When she didn’t show for her earlier sentencing hearing Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis gave Abedelal’s attorneys until the afternoon to find her.
When they failed to track her down, Ellis issued an arrest warrant and rescheduled the sentencing for Wednesday.
Prosecutors had asked Ellis to give Abedelal more than three years in prison for her seven-year scheme in which she scammed hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the school district. She pleaded guilty in 2022 and agreed to cooperate with authorities.
Abedelal’s scheme began in 2012 and continued until 2019. That means it occurred before, during and after the high-profile kickback scandal that led to the 2015 conviction and eventual imprisonment of former CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett.
“[Abedelal] appears to have just wanted to live a more extravagant lifestyle — driving a [Mercedes] Benz and purchasing expensive jewelry and fancy purses (among other things) — and was willing to steal from public school students to get what she wanted,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Prashant Kolluri wrote in a court memo in February.
Abedelal’s tenure as Brennemann’s principal led to controversy even before her indictment in July 2021. Parents protested in 2014 and complained about her “iron fist” approach to discipline.
But Bedi, in court records, noted that Abedelal had earned praise from then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The mayor said he had “immense respect” for Abedelal and told students to “remember what Sarah and your teachers have done,” Bedi wrote.
Separately, Abedelal told her attorneys that, “I loved that school.”
“I miss it every single day of my life,” Abedelal said in January, according to a court filing. “I would wake up at 2 a.m., 3 a.m. to figure out the scores and where we were dropping the ball. Brennemann was this learning oasis: the building, the children. I saw the potential, the possibility.”
But Abedelal acknowledged a desire to “want something more.” Bedi wrote that Abedelal’s scheme began “not from a place of greed but from an interest in helping get the school money and resources because the school was lacking in funding.”
“The scheme quickly snowballed into a greedy way to supplement her income,” Bedi wrote. “However, the scheme did not start as a way to get rich.”
Prosecutors accused Abedelal of a scam within a scam. Starting in spring 2012, Abedelal approached certain Brennemann employees and told them she was going to put them down for overtime they weren’t expected to work.
She told them to withdraw the unearned overtime money and bring it to her in cash.
Abedelal told her workers that she’d use the money to pay for school expenses that CPS wouldn’t cover — such as printer repairs, school supplies and salaries.
But Abedelal later admitted the “vast majority” of the more than $250,000 she secured wound up going toward her own personal expenses. She used the money to pay off student loans and her personal vehicle, and to purchase jewelry and home furnishings, records show.
Prosecutors say Abedelal enlisted employees who feared her to pull it off. They said she made one staffer chauffeur her around town, take her shopping during school hours and clean her house. She allegedly had another drive her to medical appointments. A third claimed Abedelal once yelled at her so much the employee wet herself.
“She’s not going to fire you,” one of them purportedly said. “But she is the kind of person that will make your life a living hell.”
A separate scheme involving fake purchase orders and invoices for school supplies also steered iPhones, iPads and more than $30,000 in gift cards Abedelal’s way. Prosecutors say she used the gift cards to buy, among other things, a Tiffany’s bracelet, gold hoop earrings, clothing, a Chanel bag, Jimmy Choo shoes and perfume.
Bedi argued in court filings that Abedelal was traumatized by her arrest in the case, claiming armed FBI agents kicked down the gate and door at her home and pointed guns at her in a “scene out of a movie.”
He said Abedelal had nightmares about it.
But she also told her lawyers she was “devastated” that she had “become a reviled person at Brennemann and will never again be able to set foot inside this school or teach at another school.
“Her bad decisions,” the lawyers wrote, “will haunt her for the rest of her life.”
Contributing: Rosemary Sobol