Calumet City Mayor Thaddeus Jones is accusing Tinley Park Mayor Michael Glotz of abusing his authority when a Jan. 10 search for a stolen car belonging to Glotz’s daughter spilled over into Calumet City.
Jones said that Glotz, armed with baseball bats, commanded two Calumet City police officers to search a property where the vehicle, stolen earlier that night outside a Tinley Park hotel, was believed to have been located.
The vehicle was not there, but was found two days later at another Calumet City address.
Glotz was accompanied to Calumet City by two Tinley Park officers during a search for a 2020 Toyota Rav 4, and at one point in the search a helicopter was involved, but a Tinley Park official said the aerial support was not requested by the village.
Glotz said he always has a baseball bat and mitt in his vehicle, but that it never left his truck that night.
“I’ve been an athlete my entire life and played collegiate baseball. I still stop at batting cages to hit with my son using my own bat. I’m no vigilante.”
Jones claims Glotz sought assistance from a Chicago Police Department helicopter to aid in the search of the Calumet City home initially targeted.
Rather than bringing police from his village, Glotz or the Tinley Park Police Department should have simply forwarded what information they had about the vehicle to Calumet City police, Jones said in a statement provided to the Daily Southtown.
Glotz was monitoring the vehicle’s location using a tracking device and at some point received a “ping” corresponding to an address in Calumet City, according to Tinley Park Village Manager Pat Carr.
“I am totally appalled at the blatant abuse of power and the ‘extremely wild’ tactics of Mayor Glotz,” Jones was quoted in a written statement. “Just imagine if I as the first African American Mayor of Calumet City was to show up at a Tinley Park home with two baseball bats along with two Calumet City Police officers. It would make national headlines.”
Jones, who is also an Illinois state representative, said that he “along with a few of my colleagues in the Illinois General Assembly, are requesting that the Illinois State Police fully investigate this matter immediately.”
Glotz and Carr said that a police helicopter was briefly involved at one point, but that the unit came on the scene in response to a message about the stolen car being broadcast on the state police emergency response network rather than specifically being requested by Tinley Park.
Glotz also said Tinley Park officers going to Calumet City was in line with protocol.
“This occurred because the crime happened in Tinley Park, so it was a Tinley Park investigation,” he said in an email. “This is a routine procedure. Tinley Park works in collaboration with other departments to recover stolen vehicles.”
“To be clear, I never requested or asked for any special treatment,” Glotz said. “Our police would have responded in the same way for any stolen vehicle. This was a rapid response.”
Glotz said that contacting Jones “itself would have been an abuse of power, using my position as mayor to ask another mayor for help for my benefit.”
The Daily Southtown has requested, through the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, reports and other documents from Tinley Park police pertaining to the Jan. 10 search for the stolen car.
Glotz’s daughter was dropping off food for a friend at the Even Hotel, adjacent to the Tinley Park Convention Center, when her car, which still had the key in it, was stolen, according to Carr.
Security camera images show a gray BMW sedan pull up alongside the Toyota, and a person gets out of that vehicle and into the driver’s seat of the Toyota, Carr said. The BMW had been reported stolen from an Orland Park dealership the day before, he said.
The BMW, the Toyota and a Jaguar nearby were then driven from hotel’s parking lot, Carr said.
Glotz’s daughter was just inside the main entry doors of the hotel talking with her friend when her car was taken, Carr said. Her purse and phone were in the vehicle.
“It was right after she pulled up,” Carr said. “It happened in a matter of like 30 seconds.”
The investigation also took officers to Calumet Park and Dolton and the phone was recovered from a store in Calumet Park, where an attempt had been made to sell it, Carr said.
Calumet City provided recorded phone calls made by a Tinley Park dispatcher the night of Jan. 10 to Calumet City.
In one exchange, a Tinley dispatcher informs her counterpart in Calumet City that the mayor was headed toward a possible location of the stolen vehicle, “with a baseball bat apparently.”
A subsequent call from Tinley Park to Calumet City begins with the Tinley dispatcher saying “we had your guys going all over the place looking for one of our stolen vehicles.”
“Yeah, the mayor’s daughter’s?” the Calumet City dispatcher says before softly chuckling.
Tinley Park, on the recording, advises they have a new location for the vehicle and ask that Calumet City send officers to the address in the 400 block of Pulaski Road.
“Is your mayor still chasing it?” Calumet City asks. “Hopefully not” is the reply from Tinley Park.
Glotz and Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart held a seminar Thursday in Tinley Park offering tips on how to avoid being a victim of a carjacking.
In a video posted Saturday to the village’s Facebook page to promote the event, Glotz says that carjackings represent “a disease that has affected towns across the state.”
“I’ve even been personally affected,” the mayor says, noting that earlier this year “a close family member” had a car stolen.
“It’s a frightening and difficult thing to have to go through, with plenty of repercussions,” Glotz said in the video.
mnolan@tribpub.com
