July 17--A Cook County jury has awarded $18 million to three women who were sexually assaulted at knifepoint in Chicago's Bucktown and Lakeview neighborhoods after a serial rapist walked out of a Near West Side halfway house in 2009.
The jury deliberated less than an hour late Wednesday at the Daley Center before finding St. Leonard's Ministries negligent for failing to provide adequate security and not alerting police when Julius Anderson went missing.
Anderson, who had been paroled two months earlier despite repeated pleas by Cook County and state officials, sexually assaulted three women over the next 24 days. He pleaded guilty to the assaults in 2013 and is serving a 75-year prison sentence.
Walter Boyd, executive director of St. Leonard's Ministries, said it plans to appeal, but if the verdict stands, the nonprofit doesn't have the insurance to come close to covering $18 million in damages. He said he believes the jury made an emotional decision rather than a legal one.
"There's no measure that you can put on the trauma, the pain and the suffering these women endured. You couldn't help but be moved by their testimony," Boyd said. "But the question of liability was a legal one and not an emotional one."
After a public outcry over Anderson's attacks, St. Leonard's Ministries stopped accepting sex offenders. It had been the only licensed transitional housing facility for sex offenders in northern Illinois.
In a statement, attorney Martin Dolan, who represented the three women, blasted St. Leonard's Ministries' security measures for its violent sex offenders, saying the facility at 2100 W. Warren St. "failed every step of the way."
"It's simply inconceivable that something like this could happen -- with zero oversight, screening or accountability -- that permanently scarred three women's lives forever," Dolan said. "How does a dangerous violent criminal with a long history of sexually assaulting women just disappear into thin air? This isn't a case of a sly criminal who slipped through a crack. It was a matter of a violent and mentally deranged man walking out of the door like it was his own house."
Eight days after Anderson fled, he assaulted his first victim, a 25-year-old woman, as she stepped from a cab in the 1700 block of West Cornelia Street. He assaulted her at knifepoint in an alley.
Three days later, he used a knife to force a 28-year-old woman inside her apartment in the 2400 block of West McLean Street, where he restrained her with electrical tape and a cord before raping her.
The third victim, a 28-year-old woman, was bound and raped in an apartment after Anderson followed her from the Red Line stop at North and Clybourn avenues.
Chicago police weren't notified Anderson was missing until 12 days after his escape.
Before his parole, Anderson had been serving a 30-year prison sentence for robbing two Northwestern students at gunpoint and raping a Rogers Park woman. Those attacks happened months after Anderson was released from prison in 1977 after serving a four-year sentence for a 1973 sexual offense.
The Cook County state's attorney's office and the Illinois attorney general's office sought to block Anderson's release in 2009. Given his history of mental illness and violent sex crimes, they tried to have him indefinitely placed in a treatment and detention facility, but the Illinois Department of Corrections released him to St. Leonard's Ministries.
Anderson was supposed to be monitored by a GPS bracelet, but St. Leonard's couldn't provide that service, the women's attorneys alleged. The facility also didn't have a required security guard and used inadequate sign-out procedures, according to their lawsuit.
Boyd said St. Leonard's Ministries had housed more than 50 sex offenders over the years and never before had any problems.
"In hindsight, this is someone we wish we had never taken in, and we wish these women would have never been violated," he said.
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