Samantha Harer: Federal Judge Makes Key Ruling For Plaintiff

CHANNAHON, IL — Lawyers representing Channahon Police, Crest Hill Police and now-former Crest Hill Police Officer Felipe "Phil" Flores had urged federal judge Robert Gettleman in numerous legal briefs to halt the federal civil rights lawsuit brought against them by the parents of deceased 911 dispatcher Samantha Harer. On Thursday, the long-time U.S. District judge issued his long-awaited pretrial ruling. His decision went against Channahon, Crest Hill and Flores.

"The Channahon defendants should stop wasting private and judicial resources by repeating arguments that this court has already rejected and start litigating this case on the merits," Judge Gettleman wrote in his ruling, which was in favor of the plaintiff's lawyer, Jennifer Bonjean. She is a Brooklyn, New York, civil rights lawyer who went to college and law school in Chicago.

She remains licensed to practice law in Illinois.

Channahon is represented by the village's long-time municipal law firm, Mahoney, Silverman and Cross, which is one of Joliet's oldest law firms. This year, Mahoney has lost several pretrial rulings on the Samantha Harer lawsuit, as Joliet Patch has previously reported.

The deprivation of civil rights lawsuit also names Channahon Chief of Police Shane Casey, Channahon's Deputy Chief Adam Bogart and their lead detective on the case, Andrew McClellan, as co-defendants. The plaintiff's lawyer has accused the three men who have worked together during the past several years of engaging in police misconduct.

"If, as the Harers allege, Channahon’s Chief of Police—Shane Casey—led Bogart and McClellan in an investigation designed to conceal the truth about Samantha’s death, Casey deprived the Harers of their right to access the courts," Judge Gettleman wrote in Thursday's ruling. "Because Casey had final policy-making authority to lead that investigation, his alleged acts—if proven—would subject the Town of Channahon to ... liability."

The Harers' lawyer told Patch that Thursday's written decision to reject the efforts to dismiss her police cover-up lawsuit marks the most noteworthy ruling from the federal bench on the civil rights case, so far.

"I'm obviously very pleased that the efforts by Channahon and the other parties to thwart the Harers' efforts to discover the truth about what happened to Samantha and prove that she was the victim of violence ... that we finally can get access to the full investigative files, the forensics and physical evidence and depose the important parties like Phil Flores," Bonjean told Patch.

Up to this point, Bonjean said, the Channahon defendants along with their lawyers have continued to stonewall the plaintiffs' attempts to gain access to several videotaped interviews, written statements from several witnesses who were interviewed by the police in the case, and items of evidence taken from Harer's bloody bedroom such as her wooden door and her Smith & Wesson handgun that was found in her lap, Bonjean said.

On the morning of Feb. 13, 2018, Channahon Police and Channahon paramedics found Harer in the nude inside her bedroom with a bullet through the side of her head. Flores, her estranged boyfriend at the time, was inside her apartment and called 911 claiming she shot herself after locking herself in her bedroom while he was on the other side of the door in her living room.

He told 911 dispatchers that the two of them had been in an argument that morning.

On page 11 of Thursday's ruling, Judge Gettleman wrote, "Next, the individual Channahon defendants—Shane Casey the police chief, Adam Bogart the deputy police chief, and Andrew McClellan the lead detective —argue that they are entitled to qualified immunity. The individual defendants are immune from suit unless the Harers’ right to access the courts was clearly established at the time of the violation ... The individual defendants are not entitled to qualified immunity. When they allegedly concealed the truth about Samantha’s death in 2018, they had fair warning that lying, misleading and destroying evidence to shield a co-employee from liability would subject them to liability."

On page 13, the federal judge issued the following finding in his ruling Thursday:

The veteran federal judge further explained in his decision that "The Channahon defendants’ arguments to the contrary are meritless. They argue, for example, that no clearly established law prevented police officers from 'presenting evidence in the light most favorable to the municipality.' That is an absurd framing of the Harers’ allegations.

"The Harers allege not that the individual defendants played spin doctor, but that the individual defendants lied to them and directed a sham investigation designed to exonerate Flores," Gettleman's ruling states on page 14.

In regard to Flores, who resigned from the Crest Hill Police Department back in March after being the recipient of 13 months of paid leave, Judge Gettleman only spent one paragraph in his 16-page decision addressing his efforts to get the Harers' lawsuit thrown out.

"The remaining defendant is Flores. The Harers sue him under state law for battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress. The court has supplemental jurisdiction over those claims ... If this court were to dismiss the federal claims against the other defendants, Flores argues, the court should decline to exercise supplemental jurisdiction over the state law claims against him. As discussed, the federal claims against Crest Hill and the Channahon defendants survive. Flores’s motion to dismiss is thus denied,"the judge wrote.