Nearly three years after he was charged with stalking a teenage girl from Des Plaines, Stephen Jozefow says he believes he has an impending date with freedom.
The date is Oct. 12, when he says authorities no longer can hold him in the Elgin Mental Health Center. Though he has been found mentally unfit to stand trial, Illinois law says he can’t be kept in custody longer than three years without further action by a judge.
“This thing is coming to an end,” predicts Albert Albergo, Jozefow’s lawyer.
But as his release date draws nearer, the 43-year-old Jozefow won’t be any closer to freedom if authorities have anything to say about it.
Police and prosecutors said Monday they intend to press for a civil commitment hearing to ensure that Jozefow remains in a state psychiatric hospital for years to come.
“I think he is a danger,” said Cook County Assistant State’s Atty. Michael Nolan. “If this had been a matter where he had been found fit to stand trial, we would have been seeking a penitentiary sentence. I have spoken to the victim, and she is very much afraid of this guy.”
Jozefow, a one-time substitute teacher, has been undergoing psychiatric evaluations at Elgin to determine whether he is fit to stand trial.
In a series of reports, the latest delivered Monday to Cook County Associate Judge Thomas Sumner, the findings have consistently described Jozefow as mentally incompetent to face stalking charges.
The latest report says Jozefow has been uncooperative with his psychiatrists at Elgin. They think it’s unlikely that he’ll ever be found fit to stand trial.
Under Illinois law, authorities cannot use laws spelling out the handling of mentally incompetent suspects to circumvent the criminal justice system. Without asking a judge in a civil proceeding to commit the suspect involuntarily to a mental hospital, officials can’t hold him or her longer than what would have been his or her maximum prison sentence.
In Jozefow’s case, that’s three years.
A spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Mental Health said Monday that it’s unclear what position the department will take in October, when officials must decide whether to go ahead with a commitment hearing.
But customarily, the spokeswoman said, a commitment would be pursued when an individual’s mental state was so poor, he or she couldn’t be tried.
If a civil commitment were allowed, Jozefow would remain hospitalized until a determination was made that he was no longer a danger to himself or society.
“I think at the time of his arrest, he was a time bomb waiting to go off,” said Des Plaines Police Detective Kevin O’Connell, who investigated the case.
O’Connell said his opinion hasn’t changed.
Although Jozefow has never been tried, Sumner concluded after an evidentiary hearing in December that it was unlikely he would be acquitted of the charges.
Police arrested Jozefow in July 1994, after receiving complaints that he had been harassing teenage girls in the area.
Jozefow’s pattern was consistent, according to police. He would write the girls poems and drop flowers on the front steps of their homes. He would send them letters, professing his love. As time went on, the letters became more threatening and explicit.
Police said he would also watch them from afar, using binoculars.
Ultimately, he was charged with three counts involving one victim, a 7th-grade student. Police said they had complaints from about 200 girls.
Not all of them understood what they were facing. Students at Maine West High School a few years ago found red roses on the windshields of their cars and believed them to be the work of the members of a student club.
The mystery was fueled by the fact that the boys who were members of the club never denied their role in the stunt. Only later did police learn that the flowers actually had been deposited by Jozefow.
The case against Jozefow was bolstered by a journal kept by the father of one victim. He recorded Jozefow’s efforts to establish a relationship with his daughter.
O’Connell said a search of Jozefow’s apartment uncovered files listing the names of local high school girls. Jozefow allegedly had annotated the files with a code that police never deciphered.
The detective said maps to the girls’ homes were also found, as were receipts from local florists.
