Feb. 25--The last time his family saw him, Ademola Owolana was walking away from a club in West Pullman after relatives discouraged the 26-year-old Briton from driving on American streets.
Three days later, Owolana's body was discovered on top of a decommissioned Metra Electric train in a rail yard about a mile away on Tuesday. Authorities said he apparently came into contact with live wires above the train and was electrocuted.
Owolana's cousin, Raheem Damilola Folawiyo, who was working in Houston, regrets he wasn't in Chicago to stop his relative from running off.
"He was a great guy," Folawiyo said Wednesday. "If I came to Chicago like he wanted me to the chances of this happening would have been very slim because whatever it is that happened I wouldn't let him run off like that."
Folawiyo last saw Owolana, a 26-year-old from Grays, Essex, two years ago when his cousin came to visit him in Houston.
"That was his first time coming to America," he recalled. "It was great. (Him) coming to Houston was a very emotional encounter. ... We partied together. We brought back old memories."
Authorities and family said another relative and friend were with Owolana about 4 a.m. Saturday when he wandered away from a storefront club called Club Low Key in the 11600 block of South Michigan Avenue.
Owolana stepped out for a cigarette and asked for the keys to a car, his family said. The people with him refused to hand over the keys because Owolana had been drinking and was not licensed to drive here, according to the family.
He walked east from the club and never came back, relatives said.
Owolana's body was spotted on top of the Metra Electric highliner in the Kensington Yard, about 13 blocks from where he was last seen, between 2:30 and 3 p.m. by a worker in a passing train, according to Meg Reile, a Metra spokeswoman.
The train was not in service and did not have its pantographs, which unfold and connect to power lines above the tracks. But the lines themselves were live, as is usually the case, Reile said. Officials suspect Owolana made contact with the wires overhead, which channel 1,500 volts of direct current, she said.
The cause of death was pending further investigation, but a spokeswoman from the Cook County medical examiner's office confirmed that a toxicology report had been ordered and it could takes weeks to get results.
Owolana's mother, Bolanle, who had traveled with her son from their town east of London, learned late in the afternoon that the body had been tentatively identified as her son.
"She's not doing good," said a cousin, Saba Ladega. "I'm trying to get her to relax. She's not sleeping, she's not eating, she's not talking."
Owolana and his mother had traveled from their home in Grays, just east of London, to visit relatives in the south suburbs. They were to go back Thursday, according to relatives.
It was not known how Owolana got into the gated Metra rail yard at 123rd Street and Indiana Avenue. The Kensington Yard is a heavy-equipment repair facility that's closed to the public, and retired trains are temporarily stored there until they are sold for scrap or otherwise disposed of, Reile said. Metra investigators are scanning surveillance video at the facility to see how Owolana gained entrance, she said.
Questions were raised about the storefront club and whether it was operating legally. Community activist Andrew Holmes, who has been assisting Owolana's mother, said the family had heard that it may not be operating with a license but nonetheless had advertised itself as a dance club on Facebook.
Officials with the city's department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection said Wednesday that after inquiries were raised, they determined the storefront did not have any license to operate as a dance club, nor to serve alcohol. The office served the Far South Side storefront with cease-and-desist letters Tuesday to stop operating, the office said.
Owolana's mother, Holmes said, was concerned that someone may have given her son a drug that led to his erratic behavior.
"Because he never acted like that," Holmes said his mother said.
wlee@tribpub.com
