Chicagoist Weekend Blotter
By Shannon in News on Nov 19, 2006 10:10PM
We might not have gotten a shiny new game console this weekend, but we have crime to comfort us:
- A 58-year-old patient at Provena Mercy Medical Center in Aurora died in a police shootout on Saturday. Johnnie Russell holed himself up in his room in a 4.5 hour standoff with local police, at one point taking a 71-year-old fellow patient hostage. Russell eventually opened his door and fired a shot; police opened fire in kind. Initially thought a suicide, an autopsy revealed the fatal shot came from an officer's gun.
- A Hickory Hills woman is in custody after police discovered over 30 dead cats in her house. Officers visiting the house about a lawn-mowing violation noticed a smell coming from inside. They discovered feline skeletons and carcasses littered everywhere, along with a foot of cat feces and a dead bird in a cage. The woman admitted she hasn't lived in the house for five or six months.
- A man was struck and killed by a drunk driver in an Eisenhower Expressway hit-and-run Sunday morning. Alberto Ruiz II, 26, had just crashed into the right shoulder near the Austin exit - and survived - when another driver ran him over. The offending vehicle sped off, but witnesses gave the license number to police; they tracked down the intoxicated owner and corresponding car, with gore still present where it had struck the victim.
- Finally, we couldn't make this shit up if we tried: Police busted an open-air crack cocaine market on the Southwest Side on Friday. Since August, undercover cops have infiltrated a gang-related trade going on around 63rd and Mozart. The name of the investigation? "Operation Rock Me Amadeus." Must have been hard to blend in with those poufy wigs and Austrian accents.
