City to consider $5.5 million payout to wrongfully convicted man who now faces kidnapping charges

A man who spent 22 years in prison after he was allegedly framed by a notorious Chicago Police Department detective is in line for a $5.5 million payout, even as he faces charges for a home invasion and kidnapping he’s accused of committing a year after his release.

The Chicago City Council’s Finance Committee is scheduled to meet Monday, when it will consider a proposed payment to settle a lawsuit by Ricardo Rodriguez, who says former CPD detective Reynaldo Guevara and other CPD investigators bullied witnesses into identifying him as the shooter in a 1995 Belmont Cragin shooting.

Dozens of men have won release from prison based on similar allegations against Guevara, who retired from CPD in 2005.

While he often was a key witness at trials years ago, the veteran detective has seldom been willing to answer questions under oath about allegations he threatened witnesses or steered them to identify as suspects people who actually were innocent.

Prosecutors dropped charges against Rodriguez in 2018, after a witness recanted and said Guevara pushed him to ID Rodriguez as the shooter in the killing of Rodney Kemppainen in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood.

But Rodriguez’s petition for a certificate of innocence was denied by a Cook County judge in 2019, a decision upheld by an appeals court in 2021. The certificate would have represented formal recognition from a court that Rodriguez was innocent in the murder and entitle him to around $200,000 from a state fund for the wrongfully convicted.

Prosecutors now allege in August 2019, a little over a year after his release, Rodriguez, his younger sister and two accomplices went to a house in the 2200 block of North Leamington early in the morning wearing masks, police badges and bulletproof vests, according to court records.

The group announced they were police, and the homeowner said a masked Rodriguez was at the door and knew the name of his adult son. Worried that something had happened to his son, the homeowner opened the door. The masked man then put a gun to his chest and tied him to a chair.

The four defendants searched the house for the man’s son, demanding he pay them $1 million cash or the equivalent value in drugs. When they couldn’t find the son, they allegedly blindfolded his mother and drove her to a house. There they removed her blindfold, and the woman later identified all four of them.

Later, police raided the Jefferson Park apartment of two of Rodriguez’s alleged accomplices and found four ballistic vests, blank federal search warrants, a police badge holder and nearly a dozen firearms that could shoot only blanks, authorities said. The pair were arrested days later when they returned to the apartment.

The third accomplice was arrested in San Diego in September 2020, the same month Rodriguez was arrested at O’Hare Airport as he returned from Mexico.

At his bond hearing, Rodriguez expressed shock when a judge set his bail at $700,000.

“Oh my God, Judge, that’s too high,” Rodriguez said. “I just got out on a wrongful conviction.”

He has pleaded not guilty, and court records indicate he again believes he is being framed. In a motion to suppress the statements of the woman who was taken hostage, his lawyer states detectives presented her with a photo array that included a photo of Rodriguez in his prison uniform that had appeared with stories about his wrongful conviction case.

The prison garb itself made the picture “suggestive,” and the image of Rodriguez’s face also was larger than those of the other photographs in the array, which were Chicago police mugshots.

Rodriguez’s bail eventually was dropped to $100,000, with a woman identified as his fiance posting the $10,000 needed to secure his release. If the settlement is approved by the Finance Committee, the full council could vote on the deal Wednesday — which also is the date of his next status hearing in the kidnapping case.