The town of Cicero’s chief of rodent control – who is also a local high school board member – has been ordered suspended for three days without pay from his town job after a racist post appeared on his Facebook wall.
The racist post – “IT’S FRIDAY N—-‘S – accompanied a picture of a dancing, nearly naked black child and had been on the Facebook wall of Michael Iniquez since December.
The post was taken down last week after the Sun-Times reported on it and kicked up a controversy in Morton High School District 201 where Iniquez sits as a board member. Morton 201 serves more than 8,000 students, mainly from Berwyn and Cicero.
In an interview last week, Iniquez took ultimate responsibility for the post but blamed his teenage son for putting it up. He could offer no explanation for why it was on his Facebook wall for more than four months – with his Facebook friends commenting on it – other than he missed it.
Iniquez is the son of the former Cicero police chief and makes more than $65,000 a year killing rats and other pests for the town of Cicero. He did acknowledge putting up Facebook posts about getting drunk at a Cubs game and calling U.S. Cellular Field a ghetto.
A local Berwyn parents group, Berwyn CARES, has blasted Iniquez for the racist posts and called for the town of Cicero to make its internal investigation of Iniquez public.
Town spokesman Ray Hanania repeatedly refused on Monday to answer whether the town would make the results public. The parents group has called for Iniquez to resign from the school board if the allegations against him prove true – a demand reiterated Monday by group President Robert Pauly.
Iniquez, who will also be required to take sensitivity training, did not return a phone message Monday.
