With a dozen inmates looking on, two Cook County sheriff’s deputies administered a series of beatings to Louis Schmude, punching and kicking the self-employed painter as he lay on the floor of a barren holding cell and begged for mercy.
That is the account provided by the man locked up with Schmude for much of the time Schmude was in jail. Schmude died in Mt. Sinai Hospital Medical Center on May 7 of “blunt trauma to the abdomen” that eventually ruptured his spleen.
The eyewitness, 28-year-old Aaron Bender, told of deputies repeatedly striking Schmude despite his pleas and apparent refusal to fight back in the holding cell in Bridgeview. Bender’s version of events is the most detailed public account since authorities began a criminal investigation last month into Schmude’s death.
In an interview at his south suburban apartment, Bender detailed not one, but a number of beatings he said he witnessed before and after Schmude’s court hearing in the Bridgeview courthouse. Appearing before a judge, Schmude told his wife he’d been beaten and pleaded for medical help.
The initial attack began after Schmude, 40, made an obscene remark to a female sergeant who then summoned two male deputies, according to Bender.
With the sergeant watching, the deputies “started beating on him–fists, feet, punching him in the back, ribs, all over him,” said Bender, who had been jailed for failing to post bond on a traffic violation.
Schmude begged for them to stop. And after three or four minutes they did, Bender said, long enough to drag Schmude to an elevator, where the beating, and Schmude’s screams, resumed.
Half an hour later, Bender recounted, the elevator doors opened again, and one of the deputies dumped Schmude back in the holding cell with a warning: “We’re not done with you yet.”
Bender shook his head as he recalled the events. “These are deputies. They’re supposed to be professionals,” said Bender, who had been transported with Schmude to the Bridgeview courthouse from the Chicago Ridge police lockup on May 5. “It’s not like he kicked them or hit them back, trying to get them off him.”
The sergeant and two sheriff’s deputies later were placed on desk duty because they failed to file a report about having an altercation with an inmate.
On Thursday, authorities close to the case said they expected criminal charges to be filed as early as next week. None of the officers has been identified, and representatives from their unions did not return phone calls.
Bender has been interviewed twice by Chicago police detectives investigating Schmude’s death. Detective Jack Boock, who interviewed Bender, declined to discuss the case.
The obscene remark that set off the attack came after the female sergeant wouldn’t allow Schmude to go to the bathroom after hours of waiting for his court appearance on charges of throwing a brick through his wife’s bedroom window, Bender said.
Schmude appeared before Cook County Associate Judge Gary Brownfield, who explained the charges against him–criminal damage to property and driving on a suspended license. According to a court transcript, Schmude pleaded with the judge: “Is there any way I can get medical attention or a glass of water, please?”
Joan Schmude said she knew something was wrong as soon as she saw her husband that day.
“He usually walked proud. He had kind of a swagger,” she said in an interview Thursday night in her Chicago Ridge home. “But then his shoulders were slouched, and he was shuffling and kind of dragging his feet.”
Moments later, the deputies took Schmude back into the elevator, and the sounds of a scuffle could be heard. “He started screaming before the doors closed completely,” Bender said. Hours later as inmates lined up for physical exams at Cook County Jail, Bender said, he saw bruises behind Schmude’s ears and covering his arms, chest and back.
Although Brownfield had ordered court personnel to get Schmude medical attention at about noon on May 5, he was first seen by a paramedic and a doctor about 8:30 p.m. that night during processing at Cook County Jail, according to sheriff’s spokeswoman Sally Daly. The doctor did not deem his condition serious enough to warrant emergency care, she said.
At 3:05 a.m., nearly seven hours later, he was transferred to Cermak Hospital, where county inmates are treated.
But Joan Schmude said that her husband complained about pain from the beating during phone calls to his family.
Late on the afternoon of May 7, he told his wife that at Cermak, “the doctor saw him twice and didn’t even check my heartbeat. He said, `You got to get me out of here.'”
A couple hours later, he called her again and told her, “He told me whatever medicine they gave him wasn’t working.”
She never talked to him again. Shortly before midnight Joan Schmude got word from Mt. Sinai Hospital, where he’d been transferred from Cermak, that he had died. Family members went to the hospital several hours later, and Chicago police soon arrived.
“They said it was an investigation,” she said. “They said it was a crime scene.”
In ruling the death a homicide, the Cook County medical examiner’s office said the initial injuries did not immediately result in death but caused bleeding inside the spleen that continued for a day or more. While the medical examiner’s office has said Schmude’s cirrhotic liver made “the spleen larger and easier to injure,” law enforcement authorities said no pre-existing health condition lessens criminal liability in an attack.
The family has retained attorney Patrick J. Doherty and is investigating legal recourse over Schmude’s death.
Schmude’s appearance in court that May day was far from his first.
His own mother once got an order of protection against him after he threatened to ignite her with a gas can and a lighter. He also repeatedly threatened to kill his teenage daughter, according to court records. And he pleaded guilty, court documents show, to shouting ethnic slurs at a black woman and damaging her car.
At about 11:30 p.m. on May 4, Schmude threw a brick through his wife’s bedroom window. She had previously taken out orders of protection against him, but both had been vacated.
The couple had been high school sweethearts and were married for 21 years when they began living separately a year ago, she said.
He threw the brick through her window that night, his wife said, “because he wanted me to come back home in his own crazy way.”
Explaining her husband’s erratic behavior, much of it detailed in court documents, she said, “He would get drunk and stupid.” From time to time, she added, he would attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but always went back to drinking.
A waitress at a Crestwood restaurant, Joan Schmude noted that her husband “never physically abused me or the children, but he did have a big mouth.”
The family’s home features photos of her husband and their three children on all four living room walls. A large photo of Schmude wearing a black vest sits prominently above the television set.
Pausing to collect herself, Joan Schmude admitted that the circumstances of her husband’s death mirrored his life. “I always told him his mouth would be the death of him,” she said, “and it actually was.”
