Steve Cieslewicz was awake all night, thinking not only about the fact that his mother, Anna, was dead, but also about the horrible way she died: mauled by dogs as she jogged through the Dan Ryan Woods forest preserve.
Investigators were walking through the leafless woods Monday trying to determine why the attacks occurred and who, if anyone, owned the dogs that killed Cieslewicz and seriously injured another jogger in a span of minutes on Sunday morning.
The death was the first fatal attack by a pit bull on an adult that Dr. Dan Parmer, head of the Cook County Animal and Rabies Control Department, could remember.
Dan Ryan Woods will be closed Tuesday while animal control officers set traps to capture the dogs.
Cieslewicz, 48, of Evergreen Park, was a nurse at a pediatric medical practice in Oak Lawn. She jogged 5 or 6 miles every day and ran a marathon a few years ago, said her eldest daughter, Sandi Barber.
“She loved her two dogs and she loved to jog, and she loved being a mom,” Barber said. By the time Cieslewicz reached the section of the path just north of 83rd Street, she would have jogged 2 1/2 miles from her home.
Just south of 83rd Street, the other jogger, a 30-year-old woman, was running alone at about the same time. Passersby found the woman seriously injured far off the path and called an ambulance.
The woman was at Little Company of Mary Hospital, Evergreen Park, Monday night, but asked that no information about her condition be released.
Soon after the 30-year-old woman was found, Forest Preserve officers discovered Cieslewicz, who lay critically injured close to the path on the other side of a bridge over 83rd Street. She died Sunday evening in Christ Medical Center.
As Forest Preserve officers tended Cieslewicz, the larger of the two dogs charged them from a wooded ridge, authorities said. As it approached, one officer turned and fatally shot the animal.
