Chicago Police Department officials exchanged a total of 297 emails — an average of six a day — during last year’s reinvestigation of a 2004 homicide case involving a nephew of then-Mayor Richard M. Daley, newly obtained records show.
The police refuse to make public those emails concerning the case of David Koschman, who died after being punched in the face by Daley nephew Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko, an act they decided was self-defense. The case is now the subject of a probe by a special prosecutor appointed as a result of a Chicago Sun-Times investigation.
Transcripts of the emails exchanged in January and February 2011 total “several hundred pages of documents,” according to the police, who rejected a public records request for the emails.
Citing an exemption in the Illinois Freedom of Information Act, they said the newspaper’s request would be “unduly burdensome” to fulfill. They estimated that “reading, redacting and reviewing” those emails would take officials at least 40 hours.
Every single move has been the wrong one.