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He Was Here: Chicago, 2010 (Season Five) Exclusive Limited Series; Open Homicide Case
328 Plays3 months ago
In today’s episode, we begin the limited series “He Was Here” about an unsolved 2010 murder in Chicago.
This podcast was made possible by www.labrottiecreations.com Check out their merchandise and specifically their fun pop pet art custom pieces made from photos of your very own pets. Use the promo code CRIMEXS for 20% off a fun, brightly colored, happy piece of art of your own pet at their site.
Music in this episode was licensed for True Crime XS by slip.fm. The song is “No Scars”.
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Sources:
Various News Sources Mentioned by Name
https://www.chicagomag.com/chicago-magazine/june-2015/chicago-crime-stats/
https://footprintsattheriversedge.blogspot.com
https://fstoppers.com/education/biggest-dangers-photographers-face-299728#comment-thread
Recommended
Transcript
Content Warning & Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
The content you're about to hear may be graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised.
00:00:45
Speaker
This is True Crime XS
00:01:00
Speaker
Well, for the next several episodes, we're going to be focusing on one case that sort of has a lot of moving parts to it and a lot of twists and turns. And we're going to be talking about, well, it feels like we're talking about several different cases, particularly when we open up here. We're really focused then on one thing that we want to tell you. ah You guys may have noticed that the opening music and some of the layout of the show has changed slightly and that's permanent but this series that we're introducing to you right now is called He Was Here and that series may be ongoing and it
00:01:37
Speaker
we're debating it may actually get its own feed.
Chicago in 2010: Crime Context
00:01:40
Speaker
In this instance, we're using it to discuss one case from 2010, but we have to set it up and kind of give you guys the place and time. so For today's episode, we're going to talk a little bit about Chicago in 2010. Now, Meg, do you know a lot about Chicago? Not really. But you ended up learning quite a bit. Yeah, I did. I learned a lot. I mean, it's a fairly large city in the United States and there's no lack of information on it, right? So while it, it to me, a lot of the things about Chicago, you know, mirror a typical large city in the United States.
00:02:25
Speaker
Yeah, I tend to agree with you. I will say that you and I have been pretty critical of a lot of ah the people involved in this story, including the Chicago police, critical from the perspective of taking a look at what happened here. With this story, I want to i want to set up talking about Chicago in this episode in a way that people can understand that you and I don't land on any particular blame here. I think what we've decided and it's mentioned throughout our interviews and the conversations that we have, what we decided was we really need to change the narrative of the story that we're going to lay out over the next several episodes. And we did that because one, there's very little information about this case on the internet. It's an excellent example of a really tragic case
00:03:16
Speaker
that sort of gets lost in the the shuffle of everyday life and cities and police departments, the courts, they can move on very quickly from a homicide victim under the best circumstances. So if you throw a wrench in there, and something is unusual, cases get lost that never should have been lost, and cases are left open that should have been closed a long time ago.
Changing the Narrative & Crime Analysis
00:03:46
Speaker
To start this off, I want to talk about crime in Chicago. Chicago, Illinois, it's a well-known, I don't want to call it a murder capital, but it's a well-known city for having a high crime rate.
00:04:00
Speaker
Right. And, you know, that's a lot different than saying, like, there's a bunch of serial killers operating or there's a lot of random murders occurring. yeah Right. it it Yeah, it's way different than that. Yeah. But as far as violent crimes go, yes, they have their share of them, right? But most of them have a very specific motivation. And I'm not saying like all of them are the same motivation. I'm just saying each case, it's a pretty clear cut case. Chicago is interesting from the perspective. So first of all, it's the third most populated city in the United States. You know what the first two are, right? Well, New York. Yep. And
00:04:43
Speaker
Los Angeles? yeah yeah Is that right? Yeah, yeah and it's Cook County, Chicago is a very populated and it's a large place. I think it's actually, if I remember correctly, it either was or is the second most populated county in all of the US. Now, Chicago's homicide rate has bounced around over the years. The years that we're focusing on for the purpose of the story is 2007 into 2014.
00:05:20
Speaker
Now, what happens in 2007 is crime does drop in terms of the murder and homicide count. it it has Officially on the record for 2007, you have 443 homicides. And then in 2014, you have 411 homicides. To give you the rundown of what it's been like since then, in 2015, Chicago had 478 homicides. 2016, they had 784 homicides. In 2017, they have an asterisk on it. They had somewhere between 601 and 653 homicides.
00:05:58
Speaker
In 2018, they had 513 to another asterisk, 570 homicides. In 2019, they had between 450 and 506 homicides. I can't account for these asterisks. I can only tell you that like these are the numbers that are given to me that are considered the official murder slash homicide numbers for Chicago. Right, there's just going to be some sort of characteristic, right? Right. So in 2020, they had 772 homicides. In 2021, they had 800 homicides. In 2022, they had 695 homicides. And in 2023, they had an official count of 617 homicides. When we're talking about this time period where they they stay in the 400s quite a bit, it's interesting.
00:06:52
Speaker
Do you think, so in that period of time that you just said, like you went all the way from 400 to, I don't know what the highest one was, but like, so there's a spread there. What is your initial thought on that? Well, so 800 was the peak and it was in 2021. It's kind of when we're coming out of the pandemic. There were times in history where these numbers are not unusual. In fact, if you go back to the 90s, I know that the one I remember off the the top of my head is 1992. There were 939 homicides in Chicago in 1992.
Homicide & Police Clearance Rates
00:07:29
Speaker
It's interesting to me because I think what we're seeing is police getting better, although
00:07:39
Speaker
It's more from a deterrence perspective because some of the clearance rates are not great in here. and I'm not going to go into those right this second, but the clearance rates in Chicago average in the 30s. There are a few years a long time ago, they had a 78% clearance rate, but I know it's wrong now because like multiple cases have been overturned and they found the new killer. so I don't know how you really do all of that math. my My take on it is that ah as the population rises there, police have to put forth more effort to kind of control violent crime. And the other side of it is sort of that eventually you catch the murderers. The people that would be killing in 1992, if you caught them, they're not killing in 1995.
00:08:25
Speaker
correct right sure yeah uh one of the things that i think of with those numbers in particular so and this is my perspective now. um there was a point of time There was a point in time where like the local news I would watch you know when cable still existed, they would say, you know there was a murder yesterday and it was the 35th murder of this year. right and I'm talking about like in the 90s and 2000s.
00:08:59
Speaker
and to in my recollection, the number never got very high. like in the 400s to 800s range, right? Right. But it was always alarming, regardless of what the number was. But, you know, i'm I'm just trying to give sort of a perspective on like information, right? So, you know, the news anchors just saying in this small area that we're talking about, this is the 35th murder of this year, right? Okay. And so,
00:09:32
Speaker
you look at that and you think whatever it is you think about it, right? And then you fast forward to now and I put myself in the position I'm in now and I think about all the factors that influence that number. Right. Which is where we're headed. Yes. And it makes me ah not have any idea really what any of that means with regard to a finding from the numbers, right? Because, unfortunately, sometimes math is done differently, right? Which is not possible because math is math. Right. yeah Statistics can be monkeyed with. They can be monkeyed with, right? And, and you know, garbage in, garbage out. If you have certain things happening on the input side of things,
00:10:32
Speaker
you're going to have skewed results. Why would anybody skew results? Well, there's a lot of reasons apparently, right? Yes. To have these results be skewed. So in this particular series that we're doing here, It's actually very telling that we're in Chicago, which I do, I believe I've heard just banter about how much violent crime is in Chicago, right? Yes. I think you said the murder capital, you know, there's been things, if I'm, I believe, wasn't Barack Obama from Chicago? Yeah, so you mean in terms of like... I think he was from there and I think it came up because of that.
00:11:18
Speaker
Okay, so from 97 to 2004 he was a senator in the 13th district for the Illinois Senate and then from 2005 until 2008 He was the United States senator from Illinois Right. And so just some of the things that happened in Chicago became apparent when Barack Obama was was a more centered politician leading to his presidency, right? Yeah. It came up. Okay. And so that's why I associate it in my mind. And I say there's been banter, even though I've i've never been to Chicago, I've never looked really hard into it, but it
00:11:58
Speaker
It has a place in the statistics that I've absorbed just in doing the research for all the cases we've covered, right? And yeah um just sort of in passing, because one of our presidents was from the state at least, it came up. And it it I know I always thought to myself, well, it's weird that it's so dangerous, right? Yeah. except looking into it from the perspective we're looking into it talking about this series, this particular case, I found a lot of stuff out and I actually I don't think Chicago really is that dangerous.
00:12:39
Speaker
No, it it and it bounces around. it like In terms of murder capitals, Chicago right now sits at around the 13th. Well, Illinois and then Chicago sort of sit around 13. So they're not that high in the time that we're recording this. I had gone back and pulled stacks and stacks of statistics on this because I wanted to know, what has it been like in Chicago? Now, according to what I've pulled, In 1974, there were 970 people killed in Chicago by homicide. Now, I don't know that that's the highest number, but that is the number as far as the Department of Justice's reporting goes, 1974 had 970 homicides. So we're 50 years out from that right now.
00:13:29
Speaker
and they had 970 homicides, but they that number has declined. If I were to ask you, ballpark, like you this is not like a number that you have to like look at it and go, this is exactly what it is. If the DOJ was reporting and they said to you, Meg, here's the numbers for 50 years in Chicago, how many people do you think have been killed in the confines in Chicago, like the the city limits in the last 50 years? um From homicide? ye Uh, I would say 50,000. It's actually 35,000. Well, I'd be high. Well, well, you were going by a thousand a year, but we've been, we just talked about some numbers that were kind of slightly under that. Right. But they fluctuate, right? Yes. Yes. But according to the paperwork that's kept, 1974 was the peak and it's been going down since then.
00:14:27
Speaker
You and I focused then on this part of things, because we wanted to know what was happening in Chicago in 2010.
2010: A Year of Low Homicide Rates?
00:14:36
Speaker
Great. And so there's a dip. If we're looking at a um chart, right, so there would be, you know, we've got the 70 number, the 970 from the 70s. high, right? yeah And it dips down. And then in 2010, it's pretty low. And then it it starts rising slightly, right? Up until 2024, which is where we are now. It's just a slight rise, right? Yep. Okay. And according to the numbers we were able to put together, 2010 was the lowest year for Chicago homicides since 1965, when the city had 395 murders.
00:15:18
Speaker
Now, one of the things that we're going to find ourselves asking throughout this series is were the numbers being tampered with along the way? I don't think they were. I think that there were some trends that were sort of real as far as you called it a dip, but honestly, in some places it's a dive. It goes from a very high number to a very low number very quickly. Right. and i Okay. So you're you're looking at two different things here as far as like who is categorizing what is a homicide, right? Correct. Who is reporting this data and why they're reporting it? Correct. Okay. And so you can get some conflicted
00:16:03
Speaker
perspectives or opinions on cases, depending on what you're trying to accomplish, right? yes and With our show and in what we do here in this space where we record and put it out there, We aim for the truth. Right. We just want to know what it is. Right. And so we don't, I personally don't have a motivation to say um one way or another with regard to how many people are killed in Chicago every year. Right. I don't have any stake in that. It doesn't really, I mean, it's sad that there's a lot of people killed, but a,
00:16:46
Speaker
police agency, police commissioner, whoever, Department of Justice um for the state, putting out a report might have a reason to have a number be one way or the other, right? Right. And so that's sort of what I'm getting at is statistics And it's a little bit alarming. I can't say that it it's never crossed my mind, but in this particular situation, it it had flashing lights on it because of sort of what we were dealing with, right? And I looked at it and looking at all the information, I realized it it could be, there could be a whole different report done.
00:17:34
Speaker
Like it can be a completely different situation. But without getting too much into that, I'm just saying like, so this is just sort of a baseline that was put out there. Yeah. And I pulled a blurb from the Chicago Tribune from January of 2011. So kind of looking at 2010 in hindsight, two reporters there at the Tribune, Annie Sweeney and Cynthia Dizzix, they put together like this blurb that I felt like really encapsulated like what we had seen. And you and I have gone over the numbers for 2010. We know the percentages of, honestly, most of the ah homicides in 2010 were done with a fire alarm. They were. And that and you know as we go along, we can explain the whole point of all this. There was a reason we we made that note we noticed right? Correct.
00:18:27
Speaker
And it it was then doing research on a specific case where we were like, oh, this is what's happening there. Well, we were curious, because of something that happens that you're going to find out about in the next episode, we wanted to know, would there ever be a motivation for politicians to pressure police via the administration of a city to dumb down the crime numbers? And the answer is yes, that's possible. But we specifically wanted to know if it happened in Chicago in 2010. Here is a summary blurb of how things are being put out in Chicago. And this article from Annie and Cynthia from the Tribune, its title is Police Colon, Murder Rate Drops Again.
00:19:16
Speaker
And it says, Chicago recorded 435 homicides in 2010, marking the city's lowest murder rate in 45 years. This according to preliminary statistics released Saturday by the Chicago police department. The 2010 total was down from 460 in 2009 and 513 in 2008 and would be the lowest since 1965 when the city had 395 killings. That is an astonishing and big drop," said Franklin Zimring, the director of the Criminal Justice Research Program at the University of California at Berkeley. The decline is part of a decade-long trend in violent crime in Chicago and across the nation. Total crime in Chicago through December 27th was down 4.3% and violent crime was down 10.3%.
00:20:09
Speaker
Wesley s Scogan, a crime and policing expert at Northwestern University's Institute for Policy Research, attributed some of the overall decline to smarter policing, including the use of technology to do real-time deployments of officers and the higher incarceration rates in the 1990s. But a nagging concern for the department and communities is that violent crime still has a chokehold on some neighborhoods. Scogan, who studied the department's districts to look at neighborhood crime trends, found that since 2003, many African-American neighborhoods were not enjoying declines in crime, similar to what white, Hispanic, or diverse neighborhoods saw. Superintendent Jody Weiss is considering shifting officers from slower districts where there are fewer violent crimes to their busier districts. That's the whole blurb.
00:21:02
Speaker
Right, and it's it's inspirational in that the crime rate has dropped. It is inspirational in that the crime rate has dropped, but it actually doesn't seem to know why. Yes, it's astonishing. It's almost unbelievable. Right. We got to digging on this because I honestly don't know how we end up getting this message, but the mother of a victim of violent crime in 2010 reached out to True Crime XS. I wanted to know if we were interested in collaborating on a story. So Meg and I sat down with her and we listened to her story and the story was so interesting and compelling that we felt like we had to figure out a way to share it with an audience.
Engaging with Victims' Families
00:21:48
Speaker
And the very first thing that I thought was why is this happening at this point in time, right? For us in 2024.
00:21:59
Speaker
right So based on the information that we got, looking at the situation as it was, only knowing the little bits about Chicago that I would know just skimming through whatever is happening in mainstream media, I start researching but because this case doesn't have the holes I would expect it to have. to be unsolved, right?
00:22:33
Speaker
Yeah, I agree with you 100%. Okay. And so that's where but I got started in, you know, speak, and this is the victim's mother. We're speaking to the victim's mother absorbing all the information she has and then going to what's going on in 2010 in Chicago. Right. And so what, what I find and what um we talk about is a consensus and there's a lot of shootings, like one-on-one shootings. ah The majority of the murders and homicides that have occurred historically in Chicago are cases that are very ah easily, the perpetrators very easily identified, and the motivation is very readily apparent.
00:23:25
Speaker
yeah And so in those cases, that's people getting mad at each other and shooting each other for a variety of reasons, right? And so i you know I'm not exactly sure how this is all going to play out, but the very first thing I thought of, um I believe you began the episode by saying like we've been overly critical. part of answering the why of like, why are we here having this conversation about this case? I started wondering, well, is it so commonplace that it is a one on one shooting?
00:24:09
Speaker
or another direct motive homicide that doesn't leave a lot of speculation to be had on what occurred. Is that one of the things that's behind us being where we ended up in 2024 talking to a victim's mother, right? Is it lack of experience with other kinds of homicides, right? Is it the mystery surrounding it? Is that why we're where we're at? That's an excellent question. And I think that we'll be answering it over the course of the next several episodes. So what Meg and I have been doing for the last six months is we've been talking to the victim's mother, as we previously mentioned. We've also talked to one of the lead investigators on the case. There is a private investigator that got involved for the family.
00:25:05
Speaker
and We've done research on the suspect to the point that we know who is involved here. We're going to have to unfold it in a very interesting way to tell you this story. but we decided um I think we decided about two months ago we were definitely doing this and we had been talking with um the mom that we're going to introduce to you. and when We were talking to her. She had done everything right. She had taken the steps needed, in my opinion, above and beyond what she should have had to do to get justice for her kid. And somehow justice has not prevailed for this kid. And we want to be the ones to help change some of that narrative.
00:25:56
Speaker
Now, this is not new to the Chicago area, and not to like drag this out and go a completely different direction, but I wanna share a story that I ran into along the way that I was aware of that sort of happens in the aftermath of some of this like revolutionary and amazing crime statistics happening that going on in Chicago. Now, I'm not saying it's not real, but I am saying there could be some issues with classifications. The story that I'm gonna pull from for this next part, it comes to us in the June 2015 edition of Chicago Magazine. If you read Chicago Magazine, this was actually a May 11th article online. It was written by Noah Isaacson and David Bernstein. They wrote an article called New Tricks.
00:26:52
Speaker
And the subtitle for that was, one year after we reported that the Chicago Police Department was under counting the city's murders, the problem persists and the top brass are up to something. I'm going to tell this part of it. This is not related to the main case, but we're just giving you an example of what we were working with in terms of historical research, because that's only nine years ago. And the story I'm going to tell you about is only 11 years ago. But this is another mother in her experience in Chicago during the the sort of aftermath of the time that we were looking at.
Tiara Groves' Case & Challenges
00:27:25
Speaker
Photographs and mementos pack every cranny of Alice Grove's otherwise tidy two-story house in West Pullman on Chicago's far south side. A deeply religious healthcare aide, Alice Grove's, 60, is the matriarch of a large and close-knit family. Birthday parties, church events, graduations, deaths, she chronicles them all.
00:27:48
Speaker
This is Tiara, that's her, she says, pointing above her family room sofa to a framed poster depicting a smiling young woman in a sassy confident pose with her head tilted toward the camera. She was looking so forward to her 21st birthday. In July 2013, Alice Groves learned that the lifeless body of her missing 20-year-old daughter, Tiara, the fifth of her six children, had been found naked and gagged on the floor of an abandoned Chicago warehouse. As if that weren't tragedy enough for one family, four months later, Grove's youngest child, Kenneth, was fatally shot after Ed Mele broke out at a house party.
00:28:38
Speaker
Devastating as her son's death was, Groves understood it. Kenneth was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. But she has no such closure with her daughter whose death was ruled a homicide by the Cook County Medical Examiner. The summer heat had decomposed Iara's body so badly that the pathologist couldn't even pinpoint an exact cause of death, deeming it simply a homicide by, quote, unspecified means. At first, baffled and traumatized family members called the Chicago Police Department every day to see if it had made any progress in tracking down Tiara's unknown killer. We just heard a lot of, quote, we're investigating it, says her older sister Kenyatta, who's 24.
00:29:26
Speaker
As the magazine first reported last year on December 18th, 2013, only 13 days before the police department's final homicide numbers for the year would be tallied. A lieutenant overseeing the case seized on the phrase, quote, unspecified means to reclassify the case of Tiara Groves from a homicide investigation to a quote, non-criminal death investigation, which is not counted in the murder statistics. After Chicago Magazine's story was published, the police quietly reclassified Tierra's case yet again to a new death investigation category that had just put in place. Grove's family members say that the police never told them about either reclassification. Finally, last November, Alice's daily prayers appeared to have been answered. A police detective called to tell her that he had evidence that would bust the case wide open.
00:30:23
Speaker
I asked him, is it good? He said, yes, it's good. He told her that he'd have the case closed in a couple of months, she says. And sure enough, in March, police arrested Red Martin, 30, who had lived next door to the Groves family. She was on surveillance video arguing with Tierra outside a Cicero liquor store the last time Tierra was seen alive. Police also arrested Desmond, quote, Wicked Collins, 38, a convicted sex offender with a long rap sheet. His DNA was found under Tiara's fingernails. But the Cook County State's attorney's office didn't charge Martin and Collins with murdering Tiara. It charged them only with concealing her death, the state's lowest level class four felony. According to court records, Collins told police that Tiara had overdosed on heroin while the three were at a Cicero motel and that he and Martin
00:31:22
Speaker
wrapped her body in a sheet, drove her to a house in an undisclosed area, and later hid her in a warehouse in Austin, where they staged the scene to make it look as if she'd been murdered. The Groves aren't buying it. For one thing, the medical examiner's report states that Tiara, who is a drinker but not a drug user, her family insists, did not have enough alcohol or drugs on her system to kill her. The report notes that asphyxiation was a possible cause of death. And even if Tiara did die of an overdose, why would Martin and Collins go to such great lengths to make her death look like a murder? It don't make no sense, says Alice, shaking her head in frustration. While prosecutors have discretion to charge what they like, it's unusual for them to charge anyone with a homicide when the police say there was no homicide. Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for the Cook County State's attorney's office, told Chicago that Martin and Collins had been, quote, properly charged.
00:32:19
Speaker
the medical examiner's office had not changed its ruling of homicide. So at this time, we've got two people arrested for the death of Tiara Groves. That's the piece I'm going to use for now to explain what's happening here. You hear something like this and you think to yourself, I don't know about you Meg, but what I think to myself is It is terrible that that family went through that. I am so glad that other families do not have to go through that. Isn't that typically what you think when like something like this happens? Well, so yes, but I also think to myself now that at least something happened. Right. In April of 2016, in the Chicago Sun-Times, another article by Jordan Owen pops up.
00:33:08
Speaker
This is on April 20th. It says a man and woman charged in connection to the death of a woman featured in a Chicago Magazine article in 2014 pleaded guilty Monday and were each sentenced to time in prison. Desmond Collins, 39, and Leandra Martin, who is read, 31, each pleaded guilty Monday to concealment of a death before Judge Joseph Claps, according to Cook County Court Records. They were accused in the death of 20-year-old Tiara Groves, whose body was found at a warehouse in the 4600 block of West Arlington on July 23, 2013.
00:33:41
Speaker
The death had been featured in a Chicago magazine article focusing on how authorities reclassify homicides and skew crime statistics. Grove's death was considered a murder until December 18, 2013, when Chicago police changed the matter from a homicide investigation to a non-criminal death investigation. after the Cook County Medical Examiner's Office determined the cause of death to be a homicide by unspecified means. More than a year and a half after her death, Collins and Martin, Grove's neighbor, were arrested on March 11th, 2015. Martin was caught on surveillance video arguing with Grove's at Austin Lickers on July 14th, the last day that Grove's was seen alive. Martin allegedly admitted to detectives that after Grove's overdose, she had watched as Grove's body was wrapped in a sheet
00:34:30
Speaker
and driven from a hotel in Cicero to a home before it was finally dumped in the warehouse where she was found. Her naked decomposed body was found nine days later. The medical examiner concluded that the cause of death was undetermined, but the manner of death was a homicide based on the condition of the body and the nature of the surroundings where the body was found. There was heroin in her system. Could have died from a drug overdose, but the medical examiner's office said that it could not rule out asphyxiation. Claps sentenced Collins to two years in prison, receive but he will receive credit for 405 days served in the Cook County Jail. Collins also pleaded guilty to violating the sex offender registry in a separate case and was sentenced to say eight years in prison with those sentences set to run concurrently. Martin was sentenced to 20 months in the Cook County Jail and was booked after Tuesday's hearing according to court records. She will be given credit for 22 days previously served.
00:35:27
Speaker
Okay, there's a lot that this story has in common while we're bringing you.
Series Introduction & Narrative Shift
00:35:33
Speaker
You've got a mother trying to get justice for her kid who has been found dead, a probable homicide, but there's this reclassification game going in the background. I think that's a pretty good place to set all of this up. Do you think that is a good lead-in to where we're headed for he was here? I think so, yeah. All right, so I'm gonna end this with the first part of what is gonna be an ongoing essay that I'm using. This essay is written by a young man named Ryan Buell. The essay is called Memories of the Diesel Beast. He first shared this through a blog that we're gonna talk about in the next episode that focuses on missing young adult males in the 2000s. But this is the opening paragraph to it.
00:36:27
Speaker
Jay and I met my freshman year of college and I told him his name, quote, should have been Carlos. You look like a Carlos man. It's uncanny. Your parents fucked it up. Any other dude would have written me off as the asshole that I was being, but Jay having a sense of humor and also probably just as eager to meet new friends his freshman year. He just played along. Carlos, huh? He said. Yeah. I said, Carlos. Yeah, Carlos looks good on me. From that moment on, we were pals. We went on to run up and down the Chicago dorm building's 18 floors, visiting everyone from the sixth floor up, knocking on doors and giggling as we ran away like little boys. When caught by one of the few residents quick enough to swing their door open after we'd knocked, I tried to play it off, calling out in a serious voice. Hey, we're chasing down the guy who knocked your door and ran off. Stay here where it's safe.
00:37:26
Speaker
Yeah, Jay stepped in. That guy stole my Will Smith CD. This is the story of he was here. And in the first series, we're telling the story of Jay Polayo. Next time on True Crime XS. So what I'm ah wondering is, say you have 400 homicides, because we were talking about some time ago, like how many of those are reclassified? And like, I i assume it's not a big number, and like I could request Say files from 2010 that were initially one determination that became another determination. How difficult would that be? Because that's that's the same request I made of the police department. I basically went and asked them, how many, you know, undetermined accidental self-harm deaths did you have that you reclassified as a homicide later? And I'm wondering if you guys keep track of that number as well, or if it's something that you could easily pull up for me. Well, I can tell you this.
00:38:23
Speaker
In 2010, of course, the the cameras on the streets weren't as high tech as they are now, but there were cameras on the street. I don't understand why that footage was was not pulled. As far as Jay's phone records, again, we're talking about 2010. I'm the one that had to provide cell phone information to the police. I'm in the process of appealing the results of a request for records from your facility there. Okay, so from your, I guess the agency overall. This is what I wanted to know. So, if there is a crime that occurs while someone is in your custody and
00:39:15
Speaker
disciplinary measures are done. Do they end up going before a judge? Well, the reason I ask is because here's what I want to know. This guy has an out date. It's in the 30, like 2030 something. But if he were to commit a crime while he's in your facility, who has that information?
00:39:40
Speaker
So are you, is it the position of your agency that like, physical and sexual assaults that occur within the four walls are dealt with within the four walls. That's a very interesting perspective and I'm interested in talking to you more about that if that's... Let me ask you this then, who can access the master file? Like what type person can like physically access this master file? Well, not just the disciplinary, it's not just about the disciplinary
00:40:17
Speaker
records, I would also like, I would like a log of the phone calls, at least with, like, I would like to at least listen to phone calls from this time period to this time period. Is that, is he is he actively monitored? Is someone actively listening to his phone calls? Is that something, can you tell me that? So you're saying that basically any records I ask that are about his disciplinary actions, including physical or sexual assault, of other inmates. And any records that I ask for about his phone call, they're all in this mysterious master file, and I'm not allowed to see the master file.
00:41:01
Speaker
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00:41:32
Speaker
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00:41:59
Speaker
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