How the Sun-Times reported on mentally ill people accused in killings

Working in a newsroom can feel a bit like being in a time warp. Yesterday's big news quickly gets overshadowed by what's happening right now. It can be hard to keep up.

But sometimes you need to stick with a story. Nearly two years ago, we started looking into a series of shocking, unprovoked attacks in Downtown Chicago. In each case, the accused had a long history of mental illness or delusional behavior. And nothing had been done to halt the cycle until they'd committed a terrible act of violence.

The six-part “Failure to treat, failure to protect” series of stories was published in April.

Since then, we've continued to attend court hearings, kept tabs on the implementation of state legislation that aims to address these failures and stayed in touch with family members and friends of those who were attacked or killed.

In a follow-up report this fall, we wrote about the Loop “punchers,” two men with mental illness accused of randomly punching people — mostly women — in the Downtown area or on the L system.

We also continue to fight in court with the Chicago Police Department in an effort to get police body-camera footage in one of the cases.

This reporting traces back to November 2023, when one of us, Stephanie Zimmermann, decided on that unseasonably warm day to walk from our newsroom on Navy Pier to Streeterville for lunch.

Lunch was uneventful. But later, we learned about a bizarre crime that happened around the same time just a few blocks away on Michigan Avenue. A man had plucked a big birch log from a holiday display and flung it, javelin-like, into the head of an unsuspecting pedestrian, critically injuring her.

The attack was shocking, inexplicable — and could have happened to anyone.

It also brought to mind other, similar attacks:

• A man had been punched in the head on Michigan Avenue and died.
• A young bank employee was stabbed inside her bank.
• A promising grad student was stabbed near Willis Tower on a sunny Saturday. 

The common thread was that the men accused in each attack had long — sometimes decades-long — histories of arrests and signs of mental illness and often had been found to need treatment. Most were homeless.

People experiencing homelessness and mental illness are far more likely to become victims of crime than to hurt someone else. But for this obviously violent group, we wondered why they had repeatedly cycled through hospitals, jails and prisons, getting little or insufficient treatment.

That led to us filing a series of requests for public records and going through thousands of police and court records. We did dozens of interviews with family members and friends of the victims and the accused, law enforcement and government officials, social service providers, mental health experts and others. And we've attended court appearances for the past year and a half to follow the cases of those accused.

We found that for this small group of people with severe, untreated mental illness who are violent and homeless, there is no coordinated system in Chicago to identify them, let alone to get them the help they need and, one can hope, to help prevent such attacks.

In one case, Russell Long, a pedestrian on Michigan Avenue, was knocked out with a punch to the back of the head in June 2023. According to police reports, Henry Graham, who's now accused of attacking him, ambled over to a police vehicle parked a block south of the attack and told two officers he was the one who had thrown the punch.

An affidavit we recently obtained through a continuing lawsuit to try to get the officers' body-camera footage sheds more light on that interaction. A police sergeant who viewed the bodycam videos said they show the officers handcuffing Graham and Graham making "numerous statements to the two officers regarding a battery to another person, his state of mind about what occurred and reasons why he did not remain at the scene of the battery."

Then, according to the sworn statement, another squad car can be seen pulling up, and the two officers speak with the police in that car.

"Shortly after," the sergeant's affidavit says, the footage "depicts the two officers helping Henry Graham to his feet, removing his handcuffs and giving him a warning to stay out of further trouble."

Thirteen days after being punched in the head, Long died.

And Graham — who, despite admitting what he'd done, was uncuffed by the police and let go with a warning to stay out of trouble — would go on to attack several more people, police reports show.

Three months later, he finally was charged with killing Long and is awaiting trial.

The officers ended up being disciplined for failing to file a report after the attack on Long.

We last saw Graham when he was in court Nov. 13 for a hearing. This was nearly 2½ years after Long was killed.

Recently, we heard from someone close to Long who had reread the series.

"This is everything I ever wanted to say about the guy who killed Russ," she said in an email. "Even in the face of Russ being killed, all I wanted was for people to realize that people with very real mental health issues are ignored, neglected and failed by our current mental healthcare system.

"Seeing that you two have cared enough to cover this topic is so healing. A sincere thank you."

Thanks to her and to all of you for reading. And we'll stick with the story.