Joliet report finds fault in missing Lurry video

A lawyer hired by the city of Joliet to investigate the disappearance of police station video in the Eric Lurry case found fault in the handling of the video by the police department and the Will Grundy Major Crimes Task Force.

The investigation into what happened to the video was sought by the city as it defends itself in a federal lawsuit filed by Lurry’s widow.

Lurry lapsed into a fatal coma while in police custody after a drug arrest on Jan. 28, 2020. Authorities determined his death was due to a fatal overdose of self-ingested narcotics. But police dashboard video of Lurry in a coma while police probe his mouth for the swallowed drugs has sparked criticism of his handling while in custody.

The report from attorney Sean Connolly focuses on separate video recorded from a camera outside the police station where Lurry was brought as he lapsed into the coma.

Advocates for Lurry have claimed for months that the video from police station cameras had disappeared. The Connolly-Walsh report confirms the disappearance of the video and details what happened.

The city has not released the report to the public. But Lurry’s widow, Nicole Lurry, commented on it at a Joliet City Council meeting this week after recently obtaining a copy and later made it available.

The report states that the missing video was viewed by an investigator from the Will Grundy Major Crimes Task Force, which is called in to investigate police-involved deaths, at the Joliet police station on the day of Lurry’s death.

Commander John Arizzi, who was interviewed for the investigation, was unable to “make out faces” and “was not able to see Mr. Lurry on this video due to the camera’s line of sight being blocked by a car,” the report states.

Arizzi, “determined this video had no evidentiary value,” the report states.

The video should have been preserved regardless of what opinion investigators had of its value, the report states in its findings.

Arizzi said he believed the video from the outside camera had been included in a DVD provided by Joliet police. He learned that it was not in the DVD when called by a Joliet city attorney asking if he had a copy of police station video.

“By this time, the retention period passed, and the video was overwritten and no longer available,” the report states.

Joliet has a policy to overwrite video data after 60 days for all city cameras because of limited storage capacity and costs involved in maintaining data, a practice that is common in police departments and municipalities, the report states.

But the investigation finds fault in the Will Grundy Major Crimes Task Force and the Joliet Police Department for not ensuring that all video depicting the circumstances of Lurry’s arrest was preserved.

The missing video could have shown police “personnel reacting with a sense of urgency to Mr. Lurry’s distress,” the report said.

There were five cameras around the perimeter of the police station, although it is unclear how many were working and only one apparently could show the main area of interest, the report said.

But all the cameras could have captured “bits and pieces of events taking place throughout the 33 minutes Mr. Lurry was physically present in the Joliet Police Department parking lot,” including the arrival of the car bringing him to the station, his removal “from the car to administer life saving measures,” and the arrival of the Joliet Fire Department to take Lurry to the hospital, the report states.

The report recommends that the Joliet Police Department “maintain copies of all video footage viewed by an outside entity investigating the department.”

It also recommends that the Major Crimes Task Force “specifically request copies of all relevant video footage” when investigating cases.