The Fernwood man who is charged in leading police on a chaotic, lengthy chase throughout the streets of Chicago last week is now being held without bail.
Marcel Oliver appeared on a Zoom call for his case’s second Cook County Bond Court hearing Monday and looked distraught as Judge John Lyke declared he poses a threat “to the entire Cook County community.”
Oliver, 22, had been held on $1 million bail by Judge Arthur Willis at his case’s first hearing Saturday because Oliver was still hospitalized with a punctured lung and could not virtually attend the Zoom-held hearing.
On Monday, however, Oliver’s presence meant Lyke could hear — and ultimately grant — a state’s attorney’s office petition for Oliver to be held without bail moving forward.
“This defendant ... basically disregarded the lives of countless hundreds of people on this chase,” Lyke said. “I’ve never seen a person more worthy …[of] no bail in my life than this defendant.”
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Assistant Public Defender Steven Tyson, representing Oliver, argued the no bail petition could still not be acted upon because of an Illinois statute preventing defendants from being held without bail on closed circuit television. Lyke rebuked the argument, saying that the coronavirus pandemic — which has forced all bond court hearings onto Zoom and YouTube for the past several months — created special circumstances.
Oliver faces felony counts of first-degree murder, vehicular hijacking, possessing a stolen vehicle, aggravated fleeing and eluding and failure to report an accident causing injury, according to Cook County prosecutors.
His hour-long race from police, which resulted in woman’s death, prosecutors said, when a pursuing police vehicle hit her own in the intersection of Irving Park Road and Ashland Avenue in Lake View, was televised live on several local stations.
Helicopter cameras showed Oliver apparently evading several near-captures, stealing a Nissan at a gas station, prosecutors said, after crashing his own allegedly stolen Jeep and hitting speeds of 100 miles per hour on highways and side streets before he was eventually arrested while snared on barbed wire on Pershing Road in Bridgeport.
Tyson also argued, as fellow Assistant Public Defender Courtney Smallwood did Saturday, that the pursuing Chicago Police officers involved in the fatal crash were not appropriately following CPD pursuit policies. Lyke said that would be a “beautiful argument” in civil court but was irrelevant for Monday’s hearing.
Oliver’s next hearing was set for June 25.
