The Cook County Board on Thursday approved a $4.5 million settlement to the family of a man who hanged himself while in custody at the Cook County Jail.
Michael O’Connor’s family sued under the state’s Wrongful Death Act, alleging the Cook County sheriff’s office fell short in monitoring O’Connor, who had a history of mental illness and was a well-known suicide risk when he died at the Southwest Side facility on Christmas Day in 2023.
His death was “entirely preventable,” one of O’Connor’s attorneys, Michael Gallagher, told the Tribune. “The safeguards were in place, the warnings were clear.”
The settlement was twice as much as the county has ever paid for an in-custody suicide for a pretrial detainee, Gallagher said.
“We disagree with the State’s Attorney’s Office’s decision to settle this case and were looking forward to a full hearing on the matter at trial,” sheriff’s office spokesperson Matt Walberg said in a statement.
In a statement, the state’s attorney’s office defended its decision. “As Cook County’s legal counsel, the CCSAO carefully reviewed the lawsuit and provided its recommendation to the Board based on what it determined to be the most responsible legal and financial course of action for the residents of Cook County,” spokesperson Elyssa Cherney said.
O’Connor’s was one of 18 deaths in custody at the jail that year, the highest mortality rate in two decades. Many were drug overdoses.
He was in jail awaiting trial on multiple felonies, including threatening a Chicago police officer and sending her explicit and threatening pictures and videos. He received two more charges in custody for battery of correctional staff. A judge ordered he undergo psychiatric examination, which was scheduled for the month after he died.
O’Connor had been arrested and jailed at least three times between 2012 and 2023, according to court records, and suffered from paranoid delusions, auditory hallucinations and had threatened to commit suicide multiple times. Arrested in July 2023 and considered “uncooperative,” he was assigned to one of the sheriff’s psychiatric special care units but was later assigned to general population, where he “began to severely deteriorate mentally,” according to the suit filed by his family.
An October evaluation noted O’Connor mentioned feeling homicidal and suicidal, and tried to tie a sheet around his neck. He later exhibited “bizarre behaviors” and went on to refuse psychotropic medication, according to the suit.
An Injustice Watch investigation found many of the 2023 deaths involved lapses in supervision. In O’Connor’s case, the suit alleges the office failed to “maintain adequate staffing levels to ensure that safety (well-being) checks would be performed for those detainees with obvious psychiatric illness,” and that correctional officers were “cross-watching” multiple living units from the control center of one of the units. Call-offs are common on holidays, the suit noted.
Jail policy calls for cells to be checked every 30 minutes.
Sheriff Tom Dart’s office has previously told the County Board it had instituted better health screenings, boosted access to mental health programs and expanded its live-video monitoring to better mitigate deaths at the jail. It also worked to curb drugs being smuggled into the jail.
Gallagher led the Torts and Civil Rights Section at the Cook County state’s attorney’s office from 2012 to 2015. At that time, the sheriff’s office “had made significant strides in staffing and policies which allowed them to get out from under” a federal consent decree related to conditions at the jail, he said. “I don’t know what happened over the last several years, but the number of deaths (in 2023) are more than alarming,” given the drop in the jail’s population in recent years.
The county has so far approved just over $34 million in settlements this fiscal year, according to Finance Committee records.
Commissioners also approved a $1.1 million settlement Thursday with a sheriff’s office employee who brought his discrimination case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The case centered on whether Dart’s office discriminated against that employee, John Nawara, under the Americans with Disabilities Act — even though Nawara never said or established he had an actual or perceived disability.
The case dates back to 2016 when Nawara, a correctional officer in the sheriff’s office, was put on paid leave following fights with co-workers. He was ordered to take a fitness for duty exam and asked to turn over his medical records. Nawara refused and was switched to unpaid leave.
He sued, alleging the office violated the ADA and that the mandate for a medical exam was unnecessary and discriminatory. He requested back pay for the time he was on unpaid leave. The county fought it, arguing the medical exam requirement wasn’t ordered because of an actual or perceived disability.
“If allowed to stand, this decision would have an unfortunate and potentially dangerous impact” by deterring employers from asking employees to take things like fitness exams or anger management programs necessary to work in a job, the county argued.
The 7th Circuit ruled for Nawara, arguing the exam was improper and that the county should pay him back for his time spent on unpaid leave. The county petitioned the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case and left the Circuit Court ruling in place.
