Rick Tanksley and Tony Ambrose have been Oak Park cops for nearly 30 years. Now they serve as chief and deputy chief. Over that long stretch, the six-story apartment hotel across from the main library on Lake Street has been on their radar as a worrisome building. That is especially true, they said, over the past couple of years as this building keeps turning up in the news. They report arrests for drug use, burglary and noise complaints at 855 Lake St.
Last week, a 17-year-old girl from Sheboygan, Wis., was found dead at 5 a.m. in a dirty hallway of this building, apparently from an overdose of heroin. Last summer there was an odd shooting at the building as two men chased down a rear fire escape. At a drug-related forum at the high school last year, a student who described her long drug descent singled out that building as a hub of drug activity.
Something is wrong. The cops know it. And they are working to bring all resources to bear on it.
The first priority is to sort out the last hours of Kimberly Ciotola. Right now the police know she’d been in Oak Park for less than nine hours, having arrived by Greyhound from Milwaukee last Monday evening at 8:30 p.m. They know her family had reported her missing that same day. Police know that she had connected, via the Web, with a young Oak Park man who offered her shelter, albeit in a small, unfurnished room at 855 Lake St. that he had previously been turned out from over non-payment of rent. She had no signs of having heroin or drug paraphernalia in her bag.
The 22-year-old male has been questioned but not charged. At issue is whether Ciotola ingested the heroin on her own in a fatal misjudgment or if another person supplied the drug and aided her in taking the drug.
This is going to be a tough case to make. But the determination of police leadership in this case is clear. Also clear is that wider village efforts to deal with issues at 855 Lake are essential. Something’s wrong when a person turned out of a building can easily access his former apartment. Something’s wrong when multiple police calls and arrests are tied to a single building.
Next week the village’s property standards department will undertake a thorough inspection of 855 Lake St. We’re not looking for trumped-up charges. We are looking for a clear message to this building’s longtime owners that they are under a microscope and that their building and the activity it attracts are not acceptable in Oak Park.
