Hosey: Basing cases on these blockbuster videos

The whole thing is on video and it doesn’t look good at all.

At the beginning, it seems innocent enough, just two guys sitting at a table and talking outside the McDonald’s on Jefferson Street at Woodlawn Avenue. Then all of a sudden, the one on the left announces, “Hey, we’re a group that catches child predators online,” and then it all goes sideways for the guy on the right.

The one on the right runs away but is doggedly pursued for more than 15 minutes by somebody with a video camera.

The running man had supposedly set up a meeting with someone he thought was a 15-year-old boy so they could perform sex acts on each other. To make matters worse, as you no doubt know by now, the running man was married Catholic school teacher and youth minister Jeremy Hylka, according to the police.

The police, incidentally, were sufficiently convinced that the guy in the video was Hylka and that he had headed to the McDonald’s with the intention of having sex with an underage boy that they secured a warrant for his arrest on charges of grooming and traveling to meet a minor within a day of the video beginning to float around on social media.

So Hylka’s situation indeed seems grim. And if he had any hope he’d catch a break with Will County State’s Attorney James Glasgow fobbing his case off on a special prosecutor, it’s getting dimmer by the day.

The way things go with special prosecutors, at least the special prosecutors they use around here, Hylka would have to want his fate placed in their special hands. And it’s not like a case couldn’t have been made for the appearance of a conflict of interest.

Hylka was a high-profile forecaster for the Joliet Weather Center, for one thing, and a long-time teacher at Joliet Catholic Academy for another. If they didn’t know Hylka from the weather center, then somebody at the state’s attorney’s office must have had a child at JCA when he was teaching there. That surely would have been enough for Glasgow to wash his hands of Hylka and his mess.

But a special prosecutor doesn’t appear to be in the cards for Hylka, which is tough luck for him, considering his indiscretion was caught on video and you can’t really ignore what’s right in front of your eyes. Or can you?

It’s been nearly a year since video popped up of Joliet Mayor Bob O’Dekirk stomping around and shouting orders at a Black Lives Matter rally before he grabs a pedestrian and drags him off.

The video shows the man’s brother intervening and the three of them ending up on the ground. The police then get involved and arrest the two brothers, Victor Williams and Jamal Smith. They went to court a month later but Glagow never charged them with anything.

Glasgow never charged O’Dekirk with anything either.

It looks like Glasgow’s ignoring the video. Either that or a special prosecutor named Tom Brown has the case, as sources have said, and he’s the one who has been ignoring it all this time.

Regardless, in a couple days this will all be a year ago and nothing’s been done. Brown and Glasgow won’t even speak publicly about the matter. Is it possible they didn’t see what was on the video? Maybe that’s what they mean when they say justice is blind.

• Joe Hosey is the editor of The Herald-News. You can reach him at 815-280-4094, at jhosey@shawmedia.com or on Twitter @JoeHosey.