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Resource ID: #28558
Subject: Death Investigation
Source: NBC5 (Chicago)
Affiliation: 
Date: 2019-05-31

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Description

Early on a Saturday morning in late March of 2019, a man drove the wrong way down a suburban Chicago expressway and crashed into another driver, killing them both. It's the kind of news story that - unfortunately -- we all report too often. It's also the kind of story that NBC5 Investigates regularly checks out, to see what might be behind the breaking news. In this case, we quickly discovered a man - Dan Davies -- who should never have been on the road, because of a system that simply (and repeatedly) didn't work, eventually resulting in that early- morning crash. The man Davies killed: An Illinois State Trooper named Gerald Ellis, who was heading home to his family after his late-night shift. One witness at the scene said Trooper Ellis saved the lives of others, by steering into Davies' oncoming car. Nearly every day over the two weeks following that fatal crash, NBC5 Investigates uncovered new court records and police reports, blood-alcohol analyses and dash cam video, social-media posts and States Attorney documents, all adding to a damning pile of evidence showing that Davies should have been behind bars the night of the crash, save for a series of mistakes by the Cook County State's Attorney's office. Yet, every day, when we tried to get answers from that State's Attorney, Kim Foxx, there was only radio silence. The lack of response was so galling - especially from a taxpayer-funded office accountable to the public -- that we documented, online and in real time, the actual reporting process of our daily phone calls and emails, which simply sought the most basic answers on what her office did and didn't do, in a case that clearly and ultimately resulted in the unnecessary death of an Illinois State trooper. Ultimately, Foxx was forced to respond and - finally - take responsibility for the mistakes that allowed Dan Davies to be on the road that night.

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