Channahon Police's Secrecy Stinks: Ferak Column

CHANNAHON, IL — This week marks the 10-month anniversary since a 2016 University of St. Francis criminal justice graduate who worked as a WESCOM 911 dispatcher died after a suffering gunshot wound inside her tiny apartment in Channahon. Authorities have still not said whether 23-year-old Samantha Harer died of a homicide or a suicide.

The mysterious death of the young woman who worked in Plainfield remains one of the rare cases handled by Will County Coroner Patrick O'Neil that has yet to establish an official cause and manner of death, after 10 months' time.

Meanwhile, the Channahon Police Department's conduct since February has only fueled skepticism that the department is involved in a whitewash. This police department is led by Police Chief Shane Casey and Deputy Chief of Police Adam Bogart. The village administrator is Tom Durkin.

The initial press release issued by Bogart was nine lines in length. The following is the only essential information from the press release:

"On February 13, 2018 at approximately 8:17 a.m., Channahon Police were dispatched to 25731 W. Bridge St. Apt. #8 for a reported gunshot wound. Inside the apartment, officers located Samantha G. Harer, age 23 of Channahon, with an apparent gunshot wound to the head. Channahon Fire Protection District personnel transported Harer to Presence St. Joseph Medical Center where she was pronounced dead. A firearm was recovered at the scene."

What's interesting, in retrospect, is that Channahon Police chose to omit two important facts: One, Harer was not alone inside her tiny studio apartment when she suffered a fatal gunshot. And two, Harer's boyfriend, Crest Hill Police Officer Felipe "Phil" Flores, was present at the time of her shooting, and that he called in her shooting and portrayed it as a suicide, according Harer's family.

Given how Bogart and Casey have allowed the case to drag on for nearly a year and how both have blocked the release of any and all information regarding Harer's death, including the 911 call made by Flores, I believe that Bogart carefully crafted his initial press release expecting that Flores' identity and his occupation as a fellow police officer in Will County would remain under the wraps, a closely guarded secret. In retrospect, I don't think Bogart wanted that widely known.

But once that information got publicized in the press, Bogart and others in his tight inner circle came up with Plan B: the case was destined to go into news blackout mode.

There would be no information, nothing, released to the press because this case now had to be treated with delicacy. Channahon's Police Department decided it did not want to be responsible for pursuing another Drew Peterson-type murder case here in Will County.

To recap, the day after Harer's death, Chief Casey and Detective Andrew McClelland visited Harer's distraught parents, Kevin and Heather Harer, telling them their daughter's fatal gunshot to her head was being treated as a self-inflected wound.

Officer Flores apparently told his fellow Will County police officers that Harer became despondent that Tuesday morning, that she shot herself, and he was unable to stop her from doing so, according to her family.

As far as the police investigators were concerned, Flores must have come off as being cooperative, just like how Drew Peterson left Illinois State Police Crime Scene Investigator Robert Deel certain that Kathleen Savio died of an accidental fall in a dry bathtub in March 2004. He was so convinced that he chose not to collect any evidence from her Bolingbrook home.

In 2007, Deel was sent down near Channahon, where Christopher Vaughn's wife and their children were all fatally shot along the Interstate 55 frontage road. Deel assured his colleagues that Kimberly Vaughn killed all her kids and left her husband with a non-fatal gunshot and then pulled the trigger on herself.

Related: Illinois State Police Official Botched Drew Peterson, Vaughn Cases

Now it appears that Channahon Police have worked the Harer investigation in similar fashion: trying to find evidence that corroborates Flores' statement.

Less than two years earlier, Flores was also unlucky.

In March 2016, Flores became the target of a criminal sexual assault investigation. The allegations were that Flores raped a sleeping woman in her bed after he showed up at her house in Crest Hill and crashed on her couch after a night of heavy drinking at a local bar. The woman considered Flores a friend but the two had no prior romantic relationship, Patch previously reported.

About nine months later, the Will County State's Attorney's Office notified the Illinois State Police that sexual assault charges were not being filed against the Crest Hill officer. One might say Flores caught a lucky break.

I also would expect Flores will dodge murder charges in the death of his much-younger girlfriend, a woman who had no prior history of depression or suicidal tendencies.

What's interesting, though, is how Flores has acted following her death.

If Harer indeed had shot herself in the head, isn't it reasonable to expect Flores would contact Samantha's parents to notify them what happened to their one and only child, given the fact that he was present inside her apartment when the gunshot went off?

After all, it wasn't as if Flores and her parents were strangers. He had met the parents several times during the past year of dating their daughter, joining them for dinner several times.

And there's also Flores' noticeable absence at Harer's wake and funeral service at the Fred C. Dames Funeral Home on Joliet's Black Road.

Her Plainfield coworkers from WESCOM came; so were several members of the Channahon Police Department, where Harer had worked a police intern while attending college.

At no time in the past 10 months has Flores contacted her family to talk about the circumstances of their daughter's gunshot, according to the Harers.

As of February, Flores was quite active on social media. But within days of Harer's death, Flores wiped out his Facebook profile.

Meanwhile, the Crest Hill Police Department put Flores on paid suspension related to Harer's death and has left him there ever since.

Crest Hill Mayor Ray Soliman, a former Crest Hill Police officer himself, has gone along with the costly decision to shell out thousands of dollars collected from Crest Hill taxpayers to pay Flores to stay off the job indefinitely.

Flores was making about $80,000 in salary as a sixth-year officer. That equates to about $1,540 per week. That means Flores has already collected at least $66,220 in regular pay for staying home since the death of his girlfriend under suspicious circumstances.

Last week, I paid a visit to the large apartment complex on Joliet's west side where Flores now resides, apparently with one of his brothers. I knocked on the door but there was no answer. I left my Joliet Patch business card in the door, but I didn't get a call back.

Looking back on the events of Feb. 13, it now seems clear that the infamous big, blue wall of silence was erected by Bogart and the Channahon Police Department. I can't help but wonder whether Harer's death investigation would have been treated dramatically different if her boyfriend was jobless or still employed at one of the lower-paying warehouse jobs he had before he got hired as a police officer by Crest Hill?

I think it's obvious that Channahon decided early on to keep a tight lid on any information about Harer's death that would be damaging or unsettling for Flores and Crest Hill's Police Department.

The two departments often work hand in hand on local cases, and having a murder defendant employed on Crest Hill's Police force could mean a long couple years of adverse pretrial news media coverage that both of these police departments would not want to endure.

In fact, if Crest Hill truly believed in Flores, Chief Ed Clark and Deputy Police Chief Brad Hertzmann would have restored Flores to his overnight patrol shift a long, long time ago and issued a press release vouching for his credibility and their complete confidence in him.

But they haven't done so during the past eleven months. An interesting footnote: Hertzmann was previously employed at Channahon's Police Department.

More than enough time has passed on the case for the community to know the facts of this tragedy.

And the longer the case remains open, the more the Channahon Police Department's credibility problems and mistrust with the public will linger and fester, like a bad boil. Harer's family lost faith and confidence in the Channahon Police Department a number of months ago.

I've lost faith and confidence in the current police leadership of Casey and Bogart. At this point, I don't trust these two.

If Casey and Bogart believed that if just they kept silent and stopped talking about Harer's case altogether, the community at large would forget her case and uncomfortable press attention would suddenly go away, the chief and deputy chief made a huge blunder.

It's time for Bogart and Casey to give the Will County community a full accounting of how extensive this investigation has been since Feb. 13. The police department could start by releasing all the 911 calls made by Officer Flores. Then the department should release the full transcript of Flores' interviews with police in wake of the shooting.

If Flores had no culpability in her death and no role in staging her death to appear as a suicide, he should be clamoring for the public release of such information, to clear his name, to assure Will County he isn't another Drew Peterson.

But as of now, he isn't doing any of that.

The whole case smells bad on a number of levels.

It goes without saying but I need to say it anyway: Channahon's Police Department won't be getting my vote for Will County police department of the year.

It didn't have to be this way.

A Joliet native and former investigative reporter and editor with USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin, John Ferak is Patch Editor for Joliet, New Lenox and Bolingbrook and Patch coverage for Shorewood and Channahon-Minooka.