At about 2:16 a.m. on Sunday, a red Chevrolet Silverado left the Cicero Avenue bridge near 69th Street in Bedford Park, travelled through the air, and came down on a freight train box car in the rail yard below.
Three of the four people inside were pronounced dead at the scene about half an hour later. The fourth, Vanessa Morales, 14, of Palatine, died at a hospital at about 5:35 a.m. She was due at freshman orientation at Palatine High School that morning.
"She was so excited," her father said in Spanish. "She was going to get her tablet and meet her teachers today."
Who died
- Cristofer Lopez Montan, 19, of Woodstock
- Yuarem Garcia-Pena, 18, of Woodstock
- Yaritza Martinez Villeda, 17, of Crystal Lake
- Vanessa Morales, 14, of Palatine
All four were from Chicago's north and northwest suburbs. Woodstock High School said one had graduated in May and another had attended about two years ago. Yaritza Martinez Villeda graduated from Crystal Lake Central.
The sequence, as police describe it
Chicago police say officers responded early Sunday to a report that someone in a vehicle had pointed a weapon at another person, and that the Silverado matched the description.
Officers attempted a traffic stop. The truck did not stop. Officers pursued briefly, then terminated the chase.
A short time later, Illinois State Police spotted the same truck and attempted their own stop, in the 5500 block of South Cicero. The driver initially stopped — then fled again at high speed.
The crash followed shortly after.
The question the family is asking
Vanessa Morales's father does not accept that the pursuit had ended.
"They told me they stopped chasing, but the videos online show something else. They show lots of police cars behind them. I think there are other ways they could have stopped the car."
This is the centre of the story, and it is not resolved. "We terminated our pursuit" and "no one was behind them" are different statements, and only the first has been made. Two agencies were involved within minutes of each other on the same stretch of Cicero Avenue. Chicago police ending a chase does not describe what Illinois State Police were doing afterward.
Both departments have declined to provide additional details about the pursuit. CPD says the investigation is ongoing.
Until either agency releases its own timeline, radio traffic or dashcam video, the father's account and the police account are simply sitting next to each other.
Why pursuit policy is the live issue
Police pursuits are among the most heavily studied and most restricted tactics in American policing, precisely because of outcomes like this one. Research over decades has consistently found that a large share of pursuit-related deaths involve passengers and bystanders rather than the driver who fled — people who made no decision to run.
Three of the four people who died on Sunday were passengers. One was 14.
Departments across the country have narrowed their policies in response, many limiting pursuits to violent felonies, and requiring supervisors to weigh the risk of the chase against the risk of letting a vehicle go. The reported basis here — a weapon pointed from a vehicle — is the kind of allegation that would clear many of those thresholds.
None of which establishes what happened on Cicero Avenue. It establishes why the question of who was behind the truck at 2:16 a.m. is the one that matters, and why an answer should be expected rather than requested.
This is a developing story. Police accounts, the status of the investigation and details of the pursuit are subject to change.
