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Vol. 77/No. 6      February 18, 2013

 
N. Chicago coroner: Hanna
died from cop beating
 
BY JOHN HAWKINS 
NORTH CHICAGO, Ill.—Friends and family of Darrin Hanna won a victory Jan. 22 when Lake County Coroner Thomas Rudd ruled Hanna’s death a homicide. In the weeks since the new determination, they have stepped up efforts to put the cops who beat Hanna behind bars.

Hanna, an African-American, was 45 when he died Nov. 13, 2011, a week after seven North Chicago cops beat him and shocked him repeatedly with a Taser for 20 minutes during his arrest.

“Do you want to know why I stand here before you every week? It’s to win justice for my son, yes. But more than that, it’s to keep this from happening to your son,” Hanna’s mother, Gloria Carr, said at a Jan. 28 City Council meeting.

The announcement by the Lake County Coroner changing the manner of death from “undetermined” to “homicide” is a breakthrough for us, Carr told the Militant before going into the meeting. “That’s what we have said all along. Now we have two doctors who say the same thing. We had an independent autopsy done by another doctor who drew the same conclusion close to a year ago.”

“A lot of families who have a relative killed by the cops pursue it for a while, then get depressed and drop it out of frustration,” Ralph Peterson, Hanna’s cousin, said in a Jan. 24 interview on the Internet radio show “Let the Truth be Told,” hosted by David Lowery. “We didn’t get depressed and drop this out of frustration. We mobilized and got Yancey out of there. We didn’t accept the idea that there’s nothing you can do.”

Artis Yancey is the previous Lake County Coroner who gave the “undetermined” opinion. He is a retired police chief.

“What’s different about what we’re doing is that we came together,” Peterson told the Militant after the council meeting concluded. “We’ve managed to stay together and we’re pulling in the same direction.

“What we’re doing here is not going along with the same old pattern,” he continued. “The police kill, kill again, and kill some more. The city pays out a large sum of money. Then the cops kill again.

“As long as you let them do what they have been doing they’re going to keep on doing what they have been doing.

“Money isn’t the issue here,” Peterson said. “We need to stop this from happening again. And the way to do that is to give the cops who did this to Darrin some jail time.”  
 
 
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