When Richard Burns learned in January that two ambulance workers were charged with first-degree murder after the suffocation death of Springfield resident Earl Moore Jr., he was “a bit frustrated, to say the least.”
That’s because he said no one at the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Department was criminally charged, fired or otherwise disciplined after the 2010 death of his brother. Patrick Burns died following a struggle with county deputies near Patrick’s home in Grandview after Burns had broken into a nearby home.
Burns, 50, died from “anoxic brain injury,” or a lack of oxygen, after being restrained in the prone position and “hog-tied” by police both before and during transport by LifeStar Ambulance to Springfield Memorial Hospital, according to a forensic pathologist hired by his family.
Thirteen years later, a different forensic pathologist determined that Moore, 35, died from “compressional and positional asphyxia” on Dec. 18 after he was placed face-down on a LifeStar Ambulance Service gurney by an emergency medical service technician and transported to HSHS St. John’s Hospital by the LifeStar EMT and his coworker, a paramedic. Much of Moore’s alleged treatment was documented on body-camera video from Springfield police.
Richard Burns, 61, said he was disappointed “as to why there wasn’t more of a closer look at what happened to my brother, Pat.”
After processing his feelings about the Moore case, however, Richard Burns said he felt relief:
• Relief that there’s more public awareness of the need to investigate alleged maltreatment by first responders and potentially file criminal charges.
• Relief that the expanded use of body cameras and dashcam videos make it more likely people will be held accountable for their actions; and
• Relief that public officials such as state’s attorneys and coroners can act with what Richard Burns called “great integrity.”
There also weren’t criminal charges following the April 2021 death of Jaimeson Cody, 39, a Divernon man who died from what County Coroner Jim Allmon listed as “restraint asphyxia in the setting of methamphetamine intoxication.”
Cody’s stepmother, Cindy Cody, and a lawyer representing the family in an ongoing wrongful death lawsuit against Sangamon County government in connection with Cody’s death wouldn’t speak to Illinois Times for this story.
Details of the Moore, Burns and Cody cases are similar but not exactly the same. It’s those differences that are important when a prosecutor decides whether to file charges and what the charges will be, according to state Sen. Steve McClure, R-Springfield. McClure worked as a Sangamon County assistant state’s attorney from 2011 to 2017 and wasn’t involved in any of the three cases.
“The evidence varies from case to case,” McClure said. Prosecutors and police have more access than the public to all the evidence, he said.
Potential criminal intent also plays an important role in charging decisions, McClure said. He said prosecutors must be confident they can prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt,” and that standard can be difficult for prosecutors to meet in convincing a jury.
State’s Attorney Dan Wright, who declined comment for this story, said in charging documents that Cadigan, 50, and Finley, 45, “did acts without lawful justification” that caused Moore’s death and that the workers knew, based on their “training, experience and the surrounding circumstances” that their acts “would create a strong probability of great bodily harm or death.”
In court hearings on the Moore case, Wright has cited video evidence of alleged treatment by Cadigan and Finley captured by police body cameras present at Moore’s east-side home.
Wright also pointed to statements made by the ambulance workers to Illinois State Police and St. John’s after Moore’s death that he said weren’t truthful.
In the Cody case, none of the correctional officers faced discipline related to the struggle inside the county jail, and Wright decided not to pursue criminal charges after an independent review of the evidence and a recommendation from the Illinois State’s Attorneys Appellate Prosecutor’s Office.
The review by a bipartisan group of special prosecutors, including two former elected state’s attorneys and an independent forensic pathologist, said “a decision to decline prosecution is consistent with evidence.”
Wright’s decision came despite the fact that Coroner Jim Allmon classified Cody’s death as a homicide.
Wright said in a June 2021 statement that a death classified as a homicide by Allmon “does not equate to a legal determination that an act of murder, manslaughter or other crime occurred. That is an entirely separate legal determination and application of the law to the facts contained in the investigation.”
Cody had been arrested and jailed the day before his death for alleged aggravated domestic battery and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. He became unresponsive after Sangamon County Jail correctional officials used tasers on him as many as five times and laid across Cody’s legs and back during an altercation outside his jail cell on April 27, 2021.
Cody, the father of two children, was taken to Springfield Memorial Hospital, where he was pronounced dead the next day.
There was no video footage of the matter, though there was a surveillance camera aimed at the area outside Cody’s cell where the struggle occurred. The motion-sensitive camera, which was down the hall from Cody’s cell, didn’t activate, leading to a 91-second gap, Allmon said. No footage was erased, and an Illinois State Police investigation of the case didn’t find “any nefarious intent” involved with the gap in video evidence, Allmon said.
There was no video evidence in the Burns case in 2010. Police body cameras weren’t in use by the sheriff’s department at that time.
Illinois State Police investigated the case and said four county deputies deployed tasers a total of 21 times as they struggled with Burns, a state government accountant, in a muddy ditch.
The deputies hog-tied Burns – handcuffing his arms and legs behind his back and then connecting the two sets of cuffs – and helped place him on a LifeStar ambulance gurney before his transport to Memorial on his stomach, one of the deputies testified in a deposition.
Burns, the father of two daughters, was removed from life support and died four days after the encounter. The state’s attorney at the time was John Schmidt. Schmidt said in 2010 that the deputies didn’t break any laws or use excessive force when subduing Burns.
Dr. Jessica Bowman, a pathologist hired by then-Coroner Susan Boone, said Burns died from “excited delirium,” but an inquest jury didn’t agree and failed to determine a cause of death.
Dr. John Ralston, a pathologist hired by the Burns family, found that Burns died from a lack of oxygen from being hogtied and placed prone in the ambulance.
Burns’ family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against LifeStar and Sangamon County. Terms weren’t disclosed in court documents when the suit was settled, though Illinois Times reported in 2015 that Sangamon County officials agreed to pay Burns’ estate $40,000 in a settlement, down from the original $500,000 demand by the estate.
A lawyer representing the county told a Sangamon County Board committee in 2015 that LifeStar agreed to pay a “like figure” to what county officials approved. LifeStar declined comment.
This article appears in A push to diversify.
