A woman whose 13-month-old son was struck and killed during a high-speed police chase in July 2015 is in line for a $1.4 million settlement.
On Thursday, the City Council’s Finance Committee will be asked to sign off on the settlement, one of three being considered by the committee that are tied to allegations of police wrongdoing.
The tragedy that took the life of 13-month-old Dillan Harris occurred on July 11, 2015 while the boy was seated in a stroller at 63rd Street and Ellis Avenue in Woodlawn.
Shatrell McComb, Dillan’s mother, was waiting there with other family members to take the bus to the beach on a mild, sunny Saturday afternoon.
At the same time, Chicago police officers saw a man later identified as Antoine Watkins flee a shooting in the 7700 block of South Kingston, about four miles to the southeast. Officers began a high-speed chase of Watkins’ Toyota Avalon.
According to McComb’s lawsuit against the city, the chase continued four miles through residential and commercial streets, ending at the intersection where McComb, her son, and family members were waiting.
Although the speed limit in the area was 25 mph, the vehicle driven by CPD officers chasing Watkins blew through four red lights, traveling at 60 mph to 70 mph, the lawsuit states.
At the time, the streets carried plenty of other traffic, and pedestrians were “potentially in harm’s way,” according to the lawsuit.
The city’s Office of Emergency Management and Communications “allegedly instructed” the two officers to “stop the chase,” the lawsuit claims, but two sergeants assigned to monitor the pursuit “did not issue a termination order.”
Around 2 p.m., after about 20 minutes of pursuit, Watkins lost control of the Toyota, jumped the sidewalk and slammed into Dillan’s stroller. McComb “watched her 13-month old son get run over ... then saw him covered in blood ... on the ground motionless,” the lawsuit states.
Michael Holden, an attorney representing McComb, wouldn’t comment on the settlement.
Over the years, Chicago taxpayers have shelled out millions to innocent pedestrians, motorists and passengers killed or injured during police pursuits gone bad, despite repeated overhauls of pursuit policy.
Just last fall, the city paid $2 million to compensate the family of a 55-year-old woman struck and killed while walking on a Chatham sidewalk in 2018 by a vehicle leading police on a high-speed chase after fleeing a traffic stop.
That money went to David Brown, husband of Julia Lynn Callaway; that crash was so violent her body was tossed 50 feet into the air.
Brown, minister of Shiloh Baptist Church, was to take his wife shopping for Mother’s Day. Instead, he had to bury her.
The two most costly settlements stemming from police pursuits happened on the same weekend in June 1999.
The Finance Committee also will be asked on Thursday to sign off on a $1.2 million settlement with Jomner Orozco Carreto and Carlos Ramirez.
On Dec. 11, 2020, Carreto and Ramirez claim they had pulled their car over on West Irving Park Road to use the navigation system on one of their phones.
That’s when Chicago Police Officer Kevin Bunge, who was parked behind them, got out of his vehicle holding his handgun, displayed his police star, and fired his weapon multiple times, even though Carreto and Ramirez were unarmed and posed no threat.
One of the shots struck Orozco in the hand and caused significant injury to two fingers on his right hand, the lawsuit states. Glass from the windshield shattered in his face.
Adding insult to injury, the two men were taken into custody, “falsely detained, arrested and imprisoned.”
The lawsuit accused the Chicago Police Department of failing to “properly hire, train, supervise, discipline, monitor and control” police officers who commit acts of excessive force” and of tolerating and promoting a “code of silence” among its officers.
The lawsuit notes that, on the night of the incident, Bunge had “ended a shift teaching use of force” at the police academy. He was sitting in his SUV “listening to an audio book about the Battle of Fallujah.”
