It’s a wonder there aren’t more auto accidents in the construction zones

Technically, I might be confessing to an act that is not quite legal. Although it is one that would have gotten me killed had I not done it.

What I’m talking about was a trip I made Wednesday morning to Joliet (to handle a reporter-type person assignment that paid a few bucks). From where I was early in the day, the route I used was a trip along Interstate 80 west to that city at the far southwest corner of the metropolitan area.

ONCE I CROSSED over the county line into Will County, the road became a mess of construction zones. It was so congested at points that I literally got off the road around New Lenox and used U.S. Route 30 (the Lincoln Highway) to get there.

Of course, a packed interstate highway with fewer-than-usual lanes didn’t mean that people didn’t drive like crazy.

There literally was one point when “80” was narrowed to two lanes with special signs re-setting the speed limit to 45 miles per hour. Yet I was doing 55 just to keep up with the vehicles ahead of me, and I had a mini-van bearing down on me from behind.

I also got to see one moment ahead of me where a car transferred lanes to get just ahead of the van that was ahead of me. The driver of that van immediately shifted lanes, sped ahead of that car, then shifted back ahead of him.

I’M PRETTY SURE I also saw an obscene gesture or two flung about.

Considering that it was raining Wednesday morning in the Chicago metro area – which made the roads slicker than usual – I can’t help but think that this was a particularly silly time for too-fast driving and people getting arrogant.

Particularly since construction work was taking place around us. My car sped along the interstate, at points coming within three feet (my guess) of construction workers.

Now I realize that so long as drivers don’t do anything unexpected, the construction workers are knowledgeable enough to know where they can stand and where they can’t while cars whiz by.

BUT THERE LITERALLY are too many people who seem too anxious to pull the unexpected. Which is why I wasn’t the least bit surprised when, later on Wednesday, I saw a story on the Internet about a fatal auto accident on Interstate 80.

Actually, right where that interstate meets up with Interstate 355 (a point that I passed by earlier in the day and where traffic seemed particularly messy). We probably should be surprised only by the fact that there was only one auto fatality on Wednesday – at least as far as I know.

Although this one was particularly grisly – a car was hit from behind by a semi-truck, causing it to spin out of control into the other lane, where it was then run over by another semi-truck.

Ouch!!! It makes me glad that I took the entirety of the Lincoln Highway from Joliet back into Cook County when I returned home.

I DON’T KNOW who is to blame for this particular incident. I just wonder how many more incidents we’re going to see this summer.

Then again, maybe I’m just being a little overly sensitive on account of the fact I had to do a “traffic safety school” session a few weeks ago to work off a traffic ticket and prevent it from becoming a part of my (drumroll, please) permanent record.

But we’re in that time of year when government entities hire contractors to do serious road repairs, including along the Interstate highways. I wish more motorists would be mindful of that fact.

Not that danger can be avoided by not getting behind the wheel of a car. I also noticed the police beat piece of reporting out of north suburban Evanston, where a cab driver died Wednesday. He had been shot in the head, and his taxi rolled into a parked vehicle earlier this week. A double ouch!!!

  -30-

What’s worse, Lake Shore Drive or death?

There are some people who are going to remember this week’s heavy snowfall as the storm that shut down Lake Shore Drive.

Already, there are those who are moaning and complaining about the city’s handling of the situation – claiming that somehow it is the fault of municipal government that hundreds of automobiles became stuck in the snow, and people had to be rescued from their abandoned vehicles.

ONE GROUP, THE Illinois Policy Institute, went so far Thursday as to release an analysis of the city’s handling of this snowstorm – which at just over 20 inches of the fluffy, then slushy, stuff is considered the third-heaviest snowfall ever in recorded Chicago history.

That analysis gave the city an overall grade of “B” for the efforts to keep streets clean and help people in need. Yet a sub-grade of “F” was given to the city for anything related to Lake Shore Drive.

Now I’m sure the people who actually got stuck, and who are now desperately trying to figure out where the city towed their cars to in order to clear the road for traffic on Thursday, feel like it was a traumatic ordeal.

It will be the basis of the stories they tell the rest of their lives, usually to show how tough and industrious they truly are.

BUT WHILE MORE than 130 firefighters, about 100 police officers and 30 medics on snowmobiles were sent to Lake Shore Drive to help the hundreds of motorists – some of whom were stuck in their cars for up to 12 hours, to me, the Chicago Sun-Times nailed the essence of the Lake Shore Drive situation with the final sentence of a story they published about the situation.

“City officials reported no serious injuries,” the newspaper wrote.



Lake Shore Drive was nowhere near this pristine earlier this week when hundreds of cars got stranded in heavy snowfall. Perhaps that could inspire a new song to be written about the reknowned street that is much of Chicago's far eastern edge.



It is kind of hard for me to take seriously that the worst part of the city’s handling of this week’s snowstorm of historic proportions was Lake Shore Drive when there isn’t anyone lingering in a hospital as a result, or (worse yet) lying at the Cook County medical examiner’s offices.

And yes, there are deaths being attributed to the winter weather. People did die, just not on Lake Shore Drive. As for how many, it depends how extensively one wants to count. The Chicago Tribune reported Thursday there were 12. But they were counting deaths in Cook, DuPage and Lake counties.

AS THOUGH KANE, McHenry and Will counties, along with Lake and Porter counties in Indiana (which also are part of the Chicago area) don’t count. For what it’s worth, the Times of Northwest Indiana newspaper reported at least three weather-related deaths in the Indiana portion of the Chicago area.

Then again, I suppose rooting out details of those deaths (which actually aren’t that many considering this is a metropolitan area of 8 million-plus individuals) would be too complex. Easier to focus attention on Lake Shore Drive (or the fact that Wrigley Field sustained some damage from the storm) for those who feel compelled to complain about something.

Perhaps part of the reason I’m having trouble taking the Lake Shore Drive situation as being a crisis is that I have to seriously wonder about anyone who was silly enough to be trying to drive on that particular street on Tuesday night at the height of the storm.

I’m not about to go as far as the conservative ideologues who like to preach about personal responsibility who would say it’s their own fault for being out there. But there does reach a point when I have to wonder about someone who thinks they can ignore the weather – because such hostile conditions don’t apply to them.

IF I HAD been in an area of the city where Lake Shore Drive was nearby and an option, I likely would have tried to figure out ANY other possible route to use instead. Personally, I was thankful for a last-minute change in my own schedule Tuesday that likely kept me from becoming stuck on Interstate 80/94.

Which is why I got a kick out of the answer Richard M. Daley (who still has three more months on the job before he goes into electoral retirement) gave when asked about Lake Shore Drive, which he says was a “crisis” situation.

But he says he thinks city officials did well, far better than the “F” grade some people would want to give them. Daley thinks the fact that no one died on Lake Shore Drive Tuesday or early Wednesday is a plus.

I agree with him (for once). But what amused me the most was the flippant tone he had in his voice Thursday when he acknowledged that some people were going to blame him, and the city, no matter what happened.

“SURE THEY CAN blame me,” he quipped. “That’s life.”

So what should we think of this situation? I suspect for many people, Wednesday (and Thursday) will go down as a couple of days they got off from work. In my case, because I do some work from home and never lost electricity, my telephone or Internet connection, I still earned money.

But I also had quite a bit of free time during the day Wednesday that I was trapped inside. It was the day I had enough time to watch an entire season of “The Sopranos” on DVD (the death of actor David Proval’s “Richie Aprile” character still manages to catch me off-guard, no matter how many times I see it).

Be honest. There were many more Chicagoans in my situation than there were those who were stuck on Lake Shore Drive.

  -30-

If Pat Quinn is trying to scare us into liking a tax hike, he picked the right area

Illinois government is facing particularly harsh times. The size of spending cuts that government will have to make is going to be large, and it is going to impact areas that political people usually would not even fantasize about touching.

Which is how I view the talk coming out of Springfield these days about layoffs of Illinois State Police troopers at such high levels that five of the 22 offices around the state will be shut down. Some officers will be reassigned to new areas, and existing state police districts will wind up encompassing larger areas.

WHETHER ONE WANTS to acknowledge this or not, it will have an impact on Chicago. This isn’t just a matter of rural towns with dinky local police departments that have to rely on the state police whenever they need advanced levels of law enforcement.

For one of the five offices that Illinois State Police officials say will be closed will be the one in suburban Des Plaines.

It is out of that office that the patrols maintained by state police over the North Side’s expressways are based. The South Side expressway patrols are based out of the state police office in Crestwood – which is slated to remain open.

But it is now going to have to cover a larger area, and most likely with fewer officers.

NOTICE I ZEROED in on the expressways. For that is the most common area in which Chicagoans encounter the Illinois State Police.

For the past 25 years, the state police have been in charge of chasing down speeders and drunken drivers and other misfits who happen to commit their acts while driving on the Kennedy or the Dan Ryan or the Eisenhower (Chicago’s lone GOP-named expressway).

But with five fewer offices and about 460 fewer officers (all as part of an effort to bring the state’s budget under control at a time when the national economic struggles are hitting Illinois particularly harsh), that has the state police thinking it is time for them to abandon patrols of the expressways.

They’d like to see things go back to the way they used to be – which means the Chicago Police Department having to maintain patrols of the expressway portions within the city limits, and all those individual suburban police departments that have an expressway passing through their boundaries having to take control of their portions of the roads.

IF IT READS like I’m implying such a mishmash of jurisdictions has the potential to create disaster, you would be correct.

It has always made so much sense to me that one law enforcement agency have jurisdiction over the stretch of the expressways that are meant to connect the various muncipalities of the Chicago area into one metropolitan area.

Having to keep track of the exact point on the Dan Ryan that someone does something considered illegal, then figuring out which police department gets to have responsibility/credit for the arrest is an invitation for too manyt cases to slip through the cracks.

What I suspect would really happen is that most suburban law enforcement agencies would merely give up on even trying to patrol the expressways within their town. Chicago might put a few officers to work driving along the 53 miles worth of interstates back and forth across the city during their shifts. But I would envision those patrols being so few that the odds of a speeding or impaired driver being able to go undetected on the expressways would be significant.

THERE IS ALSO the fact that those law enforcement agencies have enough of their own problems to address. They probably wish they could dump off some of their existing responsibilities on state police, instead of having to take on more duties.

Which is why Mayor Richard M. Daley is hoping he can persuade Gov. Pat Quinn to uphold the agreement that was negotiated back in the mid-1980s when Chicago turned over jurisdiction of its portion of the expressways to the state police.

He told reporter-types that the Chicago Police Department just can’t spare the number of officers needed to replace the 182 state troopers assigned to the soon-to-be shuttered Des Plaines district.

I would guess that Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart would scream something similar if anyone suggested that his officers ought to take over the expressway patrol (one way to get around that potential jurisdictional nightmare I alluded to earlier).

AT LEAST NOBODY is trying to claim that these cutbacks are somehow going to create an improved law enforcement picture for the Chicago area. Even state police Director Jonathen Monken admits these cuts will turn the state police into an agency that responds to emergencies, rather than tries to do things that are proactive.

We’re going to be hit with a legalistic mess, of which the only people who will see something positive are those crackpots who probably wish that police could be abolished and we could revert to a system where they’re allowed to shoot anybody who strays onto their property whose look they don’t like.

Think I’m kidding?

Some pundits already are wondering if these police cutbacks can somehow be used to bolster political support for the “concealed carry” measures that the gun lobby has sought for years. That thought may be even more scary than the thought of driving on the expressways with fewer police patrols.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: More Chicago cops (http://www.suntimes.com/news/cityhall/2120968,chicago-state-police-cutback-daley-032410.article) on the Kennedy or Stevenson? Or is it more likely that we won’t get any cops on the expressways (http://www.sj-r.com/news/x99764408/State-Police-plan-massive-trooper-layoffs-to-close-five-districts), except when a fatal auto accident occurs?

People already are trying to score political points (http://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2010/03/slash-state-patrol-maybe-if-the-ilga-passes-right-to-carry.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+typepad%2Fdlacomb%2Fillinoisreview+%28illinoisreview%29) off of the state police budget cuts.

Nun tops Drew on court scale

What is this world coming to? Drew Peterson was in court on Monday, and his case wasn’t even the biggest legal spectacle to occur in the Chicago area.

That would be the case of the Kane County nun, who went on trial for her behavior in an incident that left a teenage boy dead.

NOW PART OF what kept Peterson from making a fool of himself yet again was the fact that prosecutors managed to undermine his effort to get reduced bond. All he was able to do on Monday was enter the formal “not guilty” plea so his case could be assigned to a trial judge.

The way the courts work, he can later change the appeal to “guilty” once it gets to the new judge. No one pleads guilty immediately upon their arrest, especially not someone facing criminal charges for the death of wife number three when people suspect strongly that wife number four also perished in ways that qualify as criminal.

But prosecutors don’t like the judge being considered for the Peterson trial, because he’s the same judge who previously tossed out an attempt to make a criminal case against the one-time Bolingbrook police officer based on unlawful use of weapons charges (as though it should be a shock that a one-time lawman would own firearms).

So now, Will County Chief Judge Gerald Kinney will have to come in to try to resolve this dispute over who gets to be the judge at Peterson’s criminal proceedings. The matter will come up in court on Thursday. Once that issue is resolved, then another hearing will have to be held on the issue of whether or not $20 million as bond is excessive.

PETERSON’S ATTORNEYS SAY they think a $100,000 bond is more fair. Considering that it is the difference between having to come up with $2 million versus $10,000, it is a significant issue.

Until it is resolved, Peterson will continue to spend his time locked in solitary confinement at the Will County Jail – which means he’s kept away from other inmates, at least some of whom would like to establish a reputation for their “toughness” by trying to attack a former cop.

And while Drew spends the week in a cell by himself, with his only human contact being the guards who bring him his meals, the Kane County nun gets the legal spotlight to herself.

I’m sure that Sister Marie Marot would prefer not to have so much attention on her attire, or on her behavior. But she has her legal troubles due to a civil lawsuit and a court case – the latter of which began on Monday.

AT STAKE IS an incident nearly two years ago in Elgin while she was driving from a convent in Marengo to a church on the West Side of Chicago. Her van and an automobile struck each other. A 16-year-old boy died as a result of injuries suffered in the incident.

Police ultimately issued the ticket to Marot, despite the sister’s claims that the traffic signal at the intersection was “green,” giving her the right of way. To a cynic, everybody involved in an auto accident says the light was “green,” regardless of what it really was, although Marot’s attorneys insist she’s telling the truth.

What this case will come down to is the classic her word against that of the Elgin police.

Usually in “my word against yours” type cases, the sight of a police officer in uniform is enough to convince many would-be jurors that the lawman is telling the truth. Yet Marot may have the one professional piece of attire more powerful than a police officer’s badge – her habit.

THIS HAS BECOME the case that thus far has centered around what Marot is allowed to wear to court. She insists she ought to be allowed to wear her full dark gray and black robe with habit. She’s playing the “Nun card” and putting her faith in her ability to convince the jurors that she really thought she had the right of way at that particular intersection.

Prosecutors had tried to get some sort of court order preventing Marot from wearing her outfit to court. They even argued that some potential jurors might feel anti-Catholic prejudice against her.

But let’s be honest.

Prosecutors look for any legal advantage they can find. The last thing most prosecutors would care about is a defendant wearing something that might tick off a juror so much that the prosecution benefits.

WE NOW HAVE Kane County state’s attorney’s officials knowing that their careers are about to be defined this week. They were the ones who put a nun on trial for the death of a teenage boy – even though technically, this is just a traffic court case.

What is important to realize is that the teenager’s family has filed a lawsuit seeking financial compensation for the loss of their loved one. I don’t imagine Marot herself has much in the way of financial assets, but I would guess the parents are focusing on trying to get the church to have to pay something.

Yet if Marot is able to prevail and beat the case in traffic court, it goes a long way toward supporting her version of the accident story, and likely would result in any such lawsuit being perceived as a money-grubbing attempt to take from the church.

Be honest. With the exception of O.J. Simpson, few people are able to lose a civil lawsuit after prevailing in the criminal case related to the specific incident.

WE ALREADY HAVE jokes floating about the Internet about the prosecuting attorneys in this case reserving their spots in Hades for picking on a nun. How long until we get similar wisecracks about the family that dares to sue a nun?

And I’m sure some smart aleck will come up with a wisecrack about how Peterson will join them someday to make a perfect trio.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: This might turn out to be a criminal case where the prosecution’s attorneys (http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/05/in-full-habit-nun-arrives-for-trial.html) got it right with their concerns about the defendant’s courtroom attire.

If Drew Peterson ultimately is acquitted, will it be because the evidence against him (http://www.chicagobreakingnews.com/2009/05/drew-peterson-to-be-arraigned-today.html) is weak, or because the judge is biased against prosecutors?