By Dan Hinkel and Jeremy Gorner
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — If Rockie Douglas’ probation agents in Wisconsin had known he’d been charged with multiple crimes in Illinois, he might have been in prison Dec. 21. Instead, authorities allege, he fled police in a stolen car that barreled into an SUV in Chicago, killing an 11-year-old boy.
Douglas was free that day after years of lying to probation agents and sliding through gaps in monitoring and communication between authorities in Wisconsin and Illinois, records and interviews show. Wisconsin probation officials say Illinois authorities didn’t alert them to Douglas’ arrests, and his probation agents didn’t learn of them on their own. And some Illinois officials didn’t know Douglas was on probation in Wisconsin.
The Tribune has shown in past investigations that Cook County has failed to monitor dangerous convicts, and the county Adult Probation Department’s chief was removed this month. But the problem isn’t strictly with offenders in Cook County — Douglas’ recent past shows the risk posed by convicts supervised outside Illinois who travel between states.
In the six years Douglas spent on probation before the fatal crash, Wisconsin probation agents didn’t find out he was convicted of felony theft in Cook County, spent four months in the county’s residential boot camp program, did a month on house arrest on the North Shore and got arrested again in Lake County.
In October, Douglas, 34, was jailed in Wisconsin after his agent heard he’d relapsed on crack cocaine. In early November, probation officials — unaware of the recent criminal history of the man they were supervising — didn’t seek to revoke his probation. He walked free.
Just weeks later, authorities were scrambling to arrest him during what they allege was a multistate spree of carjackings, robberies and dangerous flights from police.
They were pursuing Douglas on the South Side at the moment Donovan Turnage, his brother and father were driving to get haircuts in time for Christmas, authorities said. Douglas plowed into their SUV, then stole another car and escaped after driving the wrong way on the Dan Ryan Expressway, officials said. Police caught Douglas days later in Milwaukee; Donovan died about an hour after the crash.
Teachers and students at Morrill Math and Science Specialty School are still coping with the death of an ebullient fifth-grader with distinctive black-rimmed glasses. Donovan’s third-grade teacher, Jennifer Gladkowski, was horrified to learn of Douglas’ past and authorities’ failure to effectively track him.
“There are no words to describe the senselessness of this,” she said. “It hurts.”
Though many offenders can get official permits to cross state lines temporarily — as Douglas routinely did — no national system of oversight exists to ensure a probation agent will hear of an offender’s arrest in another state.
Illinois authorities should have notified Wisconsin probation agents of Douglas’ arrests, and his agents should have monitored Douglas more closely, said Pat Tuthill, who has worked to bolster interstate monitoring since her daughter was murdered in 1999 by a convict who moved between states. Tuthill, of Florida, said there should be a way to ensure that a state’s authorities are told when an offender enters their borders temporarily and a system to make sure the offender’s agents learn of any arrests.
“It’s a real public safety concern,” she said. “There needs to be a fix in place for this.”
Douglas is in Kenosha County Jail on a raft of charges. After his recent alleged crimes, his probation was revoked and he faces resentencing, said Wisconsin Department of Corrections spokeswoman Joy Staab.
Cook County prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Douglas, and he will face charges in the fatal crash once Wisconsin authorities turn him over, said Cook County state’s attorney’s office spokeswoman Sally Daly.
The Wisconsin Department of Corrections responded to an open records request with 868 pages documenting Douglas’ supervision, but the agency declined to answer several questions on how he was monitored. Staab did say probation officials weren’t notified of his arrests by Illinois authorities and weren’t aware of them until recently.
But Cook County insists it did notify Wisconsin authorities of a 2010 felony theft case. Daly said Cook County prosecutors knew Douglas was on probation after he was arrested, and a prosecutor remembered calling Wisconsin probation authorities, though the state’s attorney’s office could provide no proof of the contact or details on who received the message.
Turnage’s family members are suing the city of Chicago over the fatal car chase, and they declined to comment directly on Douglas’ monitoring. Derrick Turnage, 20, said he’s struggled with depression since his brother’s death. He remembered how his brother’s goofy personality endeared him to people.
“I couldn’t stay mad at him. Nobody could,” Turnage said. “On a bad day or a good day.”
A pharmacist’s son, Douglas played football and swam at Zion-Benton Township High School before graduating in 1998.
“I was tremendously proud of him to say the least,” his mother, Tina Durrant, once wrote to a judge as she pleaded for leniency for her son.
But Douglas changed after high school when he was beaten with a tire iron and suffered serious head injuries, his mother wrote. His attorney, Sheldon Sorosky, acknowledged that Douglas has struggled with crack cocaine addiction.
By 2006, Douglas had already accrued multiple charges in Lake County and was on probation for a conviction on burglary and other charges when he was sent to prison after his probation was revoked.
While he was in Illinois prison in 2007, Douglas was sentenced to 71/2 years of probation for an earlier burglary conviction in Kenosha County.
By January 2010, Douglas had alerted authorities that he was living with his girlfriend in Kenosha, and Wisconsin agents were monitoring him, records show.
Less than three months later, Douglas was jailed in Cook County after being arrested in Orland Park and charged with using fake identification to buy a MacBook and iPod on another man’s credit account.
The day he bailed out, according to Sheriff’s Office spokesman Frank Bilecki, records show Douglas’ girlfriend called a Wisconsin agent to say he couldn’t report. And records show when he met with his probation agent days later, he said nothing about his Illinois arrest, reporting that he had no contact with police.
Despite the pending Orland Park case, Douglas got a commercial driver’s license, and agents wrote him travel permits spanning months — allowing him to check in by phone. Records show he reported roaming from the Chicago suburbs to Missouri, North Carolina, New York and Virginia. On Facebook, he posted a picture from this period of himself grinning next to a semitrailer.
He continued to keep quiet about his arrest and, in June 2012, told an agent he planned to travel for longer stints, records show. Instead he pleaded guilty to theft in the Orland Park case and spent four months in boot camp on Chicago’s Southwest Side, according to records and Bilecki.
After boot camp, he spent a month on house arrest with electronic monitoring at a home in Glencoe, Bilecki said. One day in December 2012, when Douglas got permission to leave home, he took a drug test in Cook County that he passed and also visited a probation agent in Wisconsin, saying he’d been on the road for several months, according to records and Bilecki.
Law enforcement agencies use databases to share criminal records between states, and it’s unclear why the Cook County Sheriff’s Office didn’t discover Douglas’ Wisconsin record. Bilecki said Sheriff’s Office policy dictates doing records checks on people in jail or boot camp. The chain of communication broke somewhere, Bilecki said, because boot camp staff never knew he was on probation. If they had known, they would have called Wisconsin probation officials.
It is unclear where the breakdown happened because the Cook County Sheriff’s Office can’t find Douglas’ file, Bilecki said.
Wisconsin probation officials say no Illinois agency managed to communicate to them that Douglas continued to get arrested while on probation.
Though the Cook County Sheriff’s Office says it didn’t know of Douglas’ probation in Wisconsin, the county state’s attorney’s office apparently did. Daly said Cook County prosecutors told a judge on the 2010 theft case about the probation. Cook County Judge Colleen Ann Hyland sentenced Douglas to boot camp in Chicago for the theft conviction. Hyland could not be reached for comment.
And Lake County prosecutors would have called Douglas’ agents after a September arrest on a charge of criminal trespass to a vehicle, but they didn’t know of his convictions in Wisconsin because they didn’t do a full background check, said Assistant State’s Attorney Stephen Scheller. The office doesn’t have the resources to run a full check in every misdemeanor and traffic case, State’s Attorney Mike Nerheim said.
Despite any failures in communication, those who have worked in probation say long absences — like Douglas’ — are a red flag, one that should spur a probation agent to further investigate the offender’s explanations.
“Your primary purpose is protection of the community, and the second priority is the rehabilitation of the offender,” said Ryan Anderson, a former McHenry County probation agent.
In the months before the fatal crash in Illinois, authorities had yet another opportunity to keep Douglas behind bars.
In October, Douglas’ father and girlfriend told probation agents he was missing and they believed he was using drugs, records show. An arrest order was issued, and he was arrested and sent to Kenosha County Jail, records show. But probation officials didn’t seek to revoke his probation, and he was freed Nov. 5.
In Wisconsin a new charge will often get a pro-
bationer sent to a judge for resentencing, said Milwaukee lawyer Amelia Bizzaro.
But Douglas was at a minimal level of supervision in December, records show. On Dec. 3 he wrote a polite letter to an agent saying he’d gotten a trucking job and needed an updated travel permit. He was written a permit for cross-country travel that lasted through the middle of December, records show.
Then, four days before Christmas, a security guard in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood saw Douglas holding what appeared to be a crack pipe, said a source with knowledge of the investigation. As a squad car approached, Douglas pulled away in a vehicle he carjacked the day before, the source said.
With police pursuing on Halsted Street, authorities said, Douglas’ vehicle plowed into the Turnage family’s GMC Yukon at Garfield Boulevard, spinning the SUV and flinging Donovan to the curb.
Douglas’ lawyer, Sorosky, said he knew little of Douglas’ probation history and declined to comment on his client’s purported involvement with the car crash. He called Douglas an “affable, personable guy.” Douglas’ parents could not be reached for comment.
Donovan’s loss is palpable at his Southwest Side school, where Derrick Turnage works watching over students at recess. Turnage, who was in the SUV during the wreck, said he cried when he saw the school’s memorial to his brother featuring drawings of the glasses he rarely took off, even to sleep, and a sketch of a football.
Turnage coached his brother’s flag football team last fall, and he remembered Donovan crying when the team lost a playoff game, saying he felt he let his older brother down.
“I went up to him. Hugged him. Gave him a kiss,” the older brother said. “I told him … ‘You’d never let me down. I’m proud of you.’”
Three months after the crash, it can be hard for Derrick Turnage to come to school, where reminders of Donovan are everywhere.
But Turnage said it’s easier than being home, where his little brother’s old room is next to his.