Her son was her whole world. And Nanci Koschman never recovered from his death.
David Koschman died 21 years ago as the result of brain injuries suffered when he was punched in the face by a stranger who then ran away.
Mrs. Koschman, a widow, made the call to remove him from life support.
For years, she didn’t know who’d thrown the punch that caused her only child to fall and crack his head on a curb on a spring night in 2004 when he and some friends were out celebrating their 21st birthdays in Chicago’s fabled Rush Street nightlife district.
She buried her son and returned to her tiny home in Mount Prospect, where she kept the window coverings drawn and her son’s room just as he’d left it.
It took years until she would learn who killed her son. That was the result of a Chicago Sun-Times investigation in 2011 that found that David Koschman had been killed by Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko, a nephew of then-Mayor Richard M. Daley and grandson of the late Mayor Richard J. Daley.
His death was declared a homicide. But the Chicago Police Department made no arrest despite investigating twice, once in the days after his death and again in the face of the Sun-Times investigation, instead blaming Koschman for his own death.
Nearly a decade after her son died and years after the second Mayor Daley left office, Vanecko pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, apologizing in court to Nanci Koschman. Vanecko got 60 days in jail.
“I got a little justice for David,” his mother said after Vanecko’s admission of guilt.
“They sure worked hard not to let the truth come out. They made a mockery of David’s accident. They put words in his mouth. They changed words. They lost files. They destroyed files. They took home files. They changed files. Is that our legal system?”
Nanci Koschman died Monday. She was 77 and had suffered from a variety of ailments, according to her family. Services are pending.
“She never got back to normal,” said her sister Susan Schulist Pazderski, her only sibling. “She just wanted to be with David and [her late husband] Bob.
“She wanted to be in that house. All of her memories were there. That was her comfort.”
Nanci Koschman and her sister were raised on the Northwest Side, where they grew up in an apartment above a tavern. She and her husband had been married for several years when they learned she was pregnant with twin boys, David and a baby who was stillborn. She was left unable to have any more children.
One night when David was 12, he saw his father collapse and die. After that, he was the man of the house, mowing the lawn and doing other chores.
When he and his four friends chose to celebrate their 21st birthdays with a night out at the bars on Rush Street and Division Street, his mother wasn’t surprised. She’d regaled him with stories about what was once Chicago’s premiere nightspot for celebrities and mobsters.
“I stood up, and I yelled, ‘Dave, I’m leaving, have a good time, call me tomorrow,’ ” she said in a Sun-Times interview in 2011. “And I had my hand on the doorknob, and, to this day, I don’t understand why, but I put my purse down and walked back into the room, his room, and he looked at me, and I said, ‘Give me a hug and a kiss goodbye.’ And I hugged and I kissed him, and he hugged me real tight. And I said, ‘Have a great time, and be careful.’ And you know how people always say, ‘What was the last thing you said?’ I said I loved him.”
Around 3 a.m. on April 25, 2004, her son and his pals were walking along Division Street and got into a drunken argument with four other people on the sidewalk. Vanecko, a former college football player who was 6-3 and 230 pounds, threw a single punch. It knocked the 5-5, 140-pound David Koschman to the curb. Vanecko and a friend then ran off.
Koschman was rushed to Northwestern Memorial Hospital. He died there on May 6, 2011.
The Chicago Police Department identified Daley’s nephew as the assailant but didn’t charge him, later saying Koschman’s friends hadn’t identified him in a police lineup.
“I wanted him to be a man,” Mrs. Koschman told the Sun-Times. “I wanted him to stand up for himself. But I certainly didn’t want him to die at 21.”
She recalled her contentious interview with a Chicago police detective, saying he told her, “You’d be really impressed by the names of the people involved in this. I said, ‘My son is dead. I don’t care who is involved in it.’ ’’
David Koschman’s death came as Daley’s City Hall was under investigation by the FBI over what quickly became known as the Hired Truck Scandal. The city had been spending $40 million a year to hire private dump trucks, often owned by mobsters and politically connected insiders. And they typically ended up being, as a Sun-Times investigation found, “Paid to do nothing.”
Daley’s inner circle closed ranks. And, as Koschman’s death remained on the books as an open, unsolved homicide, the mayor declined to run for a seventh term, retiring as Chicago’s longest-serving mayor, eclipsing his father’s tenure.
Months before Daley left office in May 2011, the Sun-Times made a request under Illinois’ public records law to review the police department’s files in the Koschman case.
Instead of releasing those records, the police immediately ordered a new investigation. This time, other detectives conducted interviews and concluded that Vanecko threw the fatal punch but that he shouldn’t be charged, deciding he’d acted in self-defense, even though he struck the only blow in the confrontation with the far smaller man.
The Sun-Times investigation continued long after Daley stepped aside, examining aspects of the case including the failure by the police department to ever even question the mayor’s nephew.
Those reports prompted two prominent Chicago lawyers, Locke Bowman and G. Flint Taylor, to take on Nanci Koschman’s case, seeking a special prosecutor to investigate her son’s death.
“If David had punched R.J. Vanecko, I’d be visiting my son in prison this Christmas,” she said in an interview.
Cook County Circuit Judge Michael Toomin agreed to appoint a special prosecutor, selecting former U.S. Attorney Dan K. Webb, who had prosecuted crooked judges in Chicago and later was a special prosecutor in the Iran-Contra case.
In appointing Webb, Toomin said he didn’t buy the police department’s conclusion that Vanecko acted in self-defense. He pointed out that the mayor’s nephew had never talked with any cops or prosecutors.
“This was a defense conjured up by police and prosecutors,” the judge said. “This is not a whodunnit. In this building, when you have a dead body, someone’s going to jail. Not in this case.”
Webb presented the case to a grand jury that indicted Vanecko in December 2012 on a charge of involuntary manslaughter. This was more than eight years after Daley’s nephew punched Koschman.
Webb found that the original police files had gone missing, reportedly turning up in the basement of a high-ranking cop’s bungalow. He also found that the final police report clearing Vanecko had been fabricated when the cops said Koschman had yelled, “F— you. I’ll kick your ass.” In fact, there was no evidence that Koschman ever said that.
The grand jury didn’t charge any of the police officers and officials who covered up the Koschman case for years. Webb said he didn’t think there was enough evidence to convict them of misconduct.
But several of the cops chose to retire and collect their pensions, avoiding possible disciplinary action.
Webb also said he found no evidence that Daley or his family had influenced the police investigation.
The prosecutor had allowed Daley and his relatives to give written statements to the grand jury regarding their knowledge of the case. Those statements have never been made public.
Nanci Koschman sued Vanecko, City Hall, several police officers and the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. But a federal judge dismissed the case, ruling that she had waited too long to file the suit — even though Mrs. Koschman’s lawyers argued that she couldn’t have sued earlier because the circumstances surrounding her son’s death and the police investigation had been covered up.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who succeeded Daley, agreed that the city would pay Mrs. Koschman $250,000 in exchange for dropping her legal claims against City Hall and 21 cops. Months later, she reached a $50,000 settlement with Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez.