Opinion ID: 4541259
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: facts

Text: On February 12, 2018, Samantha and Flores had a fight in Samantha’s apartment in Channahon, Illinois. Consequently, the couple slept separately that night: Samantha in her bedroom and Flores on the couch. At 8:00 a.m. the next morning, Flores confronted Samantha about her text conversations with another oﬃcer that Flores discovered on her cell phone. The confrontation escalated. A neighbor heard banging on the walls and a woman repeatedly yelling: “Let me go.” At 8:19 a.m., Flores called 9-1-1 and told the operator that Samantha had shot herself. He explained that they had been arguing, she had asked him to leave, and he was in the process of leaving when he heard Samantha’s “gun rack” followed by a single shot. Samantha’s bedroom door was locked, so he “busted into the bedroom.” Flores saw Samantha unconscious with a head wound and a gun laying between her legs. The operator suggested Flores perform CPR, but Flores declined; he said Samantha was not breathing and that he could see her brain matter. Flores told the operator that he never touched Samantha’s body. (He later recounted that he had lifted her head after she shot herself. The police never asked Flores to reconcile these inconsistent statements.) Thereafter, police and emergency personnel arrived. They observed a gunshot wound to Samantha’s head, among other 4 No. 19-3334 injuries, and detected a faint pulse. Although Flores told them that he was on the other side of the locked door when he heard Samantha shoot herself, there was blood spattered on the front and right sleeve of Flores’s sweatshirt. Likewise, Flores’s white socks did not have any blood on them, despite that he said he was “kneeling” next to Samantha and “talking to her” while he was still on the phone with the operator. Paramedics took Samantha to the hospital, where she died. An hour after the shooting, the Channahon detective in charge of investigating Samantha’s death, Andrew McClellan, examined the scene. He did so with a forensic evidence technician from the Illinois State Police. As the technician was evaluating the blood spatter evidence, Detective McClellan incorrectly told him that Flores had rendered aid to Samantha. The Harers believe the detective misled the technician to minimize the significance of the blood splatter on Flores’s sweatshirt. They home in on how the investigators failed to ask Flores why he had blood spatter on his clothing if he was not in the room when Samantha discharged the weapon. What is more, the Harers say the investigators never questioned Flores about why they found Samantha naked if the couple was allegedly arguing prior to the shooting. Rather, the investigators simply accepted Flores’s story that Samantha was just “depressed,” as opposed to testing Flores for alcohol and drug use and looking into his prior history of violence against women. This alleged misconduct culminated in Detective McClellan either implicitly or explicitly instructing the technician to make a preliminary finding of suicide. The technician complied and—without processing any forensic evidence or talking to Flores, or any other witness—determined that the scene was consistent with a suicide. No. 19-3334 5 A day later, Detective McClellan, joined by Channahon Chief of Police Shane Casey, told Samantha’s parents that their daughter had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Chief Casey and Detective McClellan did not tell the Harers that a neighbor had heard a struggle shortly before the shooting or that Flores’s sweatshirt had blood spatter on it. Instead, they told the Harers that Samantha’s hand was positive for gunshot residue and that Flores’s was negative. That was not true. No test discovered any gunshot residue on Samantha’s hands. Conversely, tests revealed gunshot residue on Flores’s right hand and the front and cuﬀs of his sweatshirt. Eventually, a police oﬃcer in neighboring Plainfield came forward with pertinent information about Samantha. Detective McLellan did not seek to interview the Plainfield oﬃcer until three days before Channahon closed its investigation. The Plainfield oﬃcer had frequently texted with Samantha and told the detective that there was “no way” Samantha would kill herself. Following the interview, Channahon promptly closed the investigation without anyone ever addressing the matter with Flores. According to the Harers, the police refused to communicate with them, failing to provide even basic information about who was supervising the investigation. At their wits’ end, the Harers retained an attorney to help them get answers to their questions about their daughter’s death.