Daily Herald: Suburban Chicago
Address:http://www.dailyherald.com/main_story.asp?intid=3721948

Man won’t be charged for killing intruder
By David R. Kazak Daily Herald Legal Affairs Writer
Posted on November 24, 2001

The Thanksgiving Day shooting death of a 42-year-old Buffalo Grove man
was justified and will not result in charges, Cook County authorities
said Friday.

Curtis Reed, of 189 Woodstone Drive, Buffalo Grove, was shot and killed,
police said, after he broke into a home on Chicago’s West Side and
threatened the occupants, a 57-year-old woman and 58-year-old man.

Chicago police spokeswoman Laura Kubiak said the incident happened
around 4 a.m.
Thursday on the 3800 block of West Monroe, when the residents there were
startled awake by banging noises on a basement door.

The couple soon realized someone had entered the basement and began
walking up the stairs, police said.

“(Reed) started banging and yelling at the door at the top of the
stairs, saying ‘Let me in,’ and ‘Show me your (breasts).’?” Kubiak
said. Then, she said, Reed pushed open the door and lunged at the
58-year-old man, who produced a handgun and fired one shot.

Minutes later, police arrived and took Reed directly to the Cook County
medical examiner’s office, where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Reed’s 24-year-old son, who lived with his father at the Buffalo Grove
townhouse, said he couldn’t believe his father was capable of doing what
police said he did.

“I know my father,” Damien Turner said. “That doesn’t sound like
something he would do.”
Reed’s brother, Rufus Reed, a 38-year-old Berwyn resident, echoed his
nephew’s disbelief.

“That’s just not real,” he said, questioning the police account of what
happened. “Thievery? Robbery? That’s just not him.”

Neither Rufus Reed nor Turner could explain why Reed would have been at
that house.

Turner said he last saw his father on Wednesday, when Reed dropped him
off at a friend’s house in Chicago shortly after 7 p.m.
The pair had just finished delivering
Thanksgiving food to Reed’s mother at her home in Berwyn.

“He said he’d be back to pick me up at about 9:30,” Turner said. “He
never showed up.”
Reed didn’t show up the next day for

Thanksgiving Day dinner, either, Turner said.

On Friday, Turner said he was expecting to hear the garage door open up
just as it always had when his father came home.

“Never in a million years did I think (someone) would be telling me my
father was dead,” Turner said.

Reed moved from the city’s West Side to
Buffalo Grove in the early 1990s after struggling with a drug problem,
Turner said. As far as he knew, his father had beaten his addiction and
stayed clean, he said.

Earlier this year, Reed was laid off from his shipping and receiving
job, but Turner said his father was working as hard as ever after being
called back in recently.

“He came home from work each day, and he’d get up the next morning and
go right back in,” Turner said.

Reed’s neighbor, 49-year-old Gwen Nelson, burst into tears when Turner
told her the news.
She recounted how Reed helped her put up Christmas lights and how he was
adored by her 18-year-old son.

Both families looked after each other, she said, adding that Reed was
never anything less than an “excellent” neighbor.

“I’m in shock,” she said. “I know he had his troubles, but this …”

Kubiak said the case had been investigated and reviewed by the Cook
County state’s attorney’s office, which determined that no charges
against the Chicago man who fired the gun were necessary.

“They considered this completely justified,” Kubiak said.

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