By Rummana Hussain and Stefano Esposito
Chicago Sun-Times
CHICAGO — A little more than a year after Chicago Police Officer Michael Bailey was shot and killed just steps from his front door, a 24-year-old man already convicted of assaulting another officer was charged with Bailey’s murder Tuesday.
Antwon Carter is charged with first-degree murder of a police officer and attempted armed robbery, according to Sally Daly, a spokeswoman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office.
Carter, of the 1200 block of E. 69th, also was charged with aggravated vehicular carjacking in an unrelated incident, Daly said. Carter allegedly carjacked a motorist at 75th and Cornell just a few days after Bailey was killed.
Bailey’s widow, Pamela Bailey, praised police and other officials.
“I’m very excited. This was good news today. It was good news,” she told WBBM-TV. “I knew sooner or later it would happen. They’d find out who killed my husband.”
Bailey, 62, was shot to death while cleaning his new black Buick Regal outside his home in the Park Manor neighborhood on the city’s South Side about 6 a.m. July 18, 2010, in what authorities say was a botched robbery attempt.
Bailey, just weeks from retiring, had bought himself the Buick as a retirement present three weeks earlier. The father of three had just completed an overnight shift guarding then-Mayor Richard M. Daley’s South Loop town house.
Sources told the Chicago Sun-Times earlier this month that the break in the Bailey case came late last year from a fellow inmate who had crossed paths with Carter at Cook County Jail. According to the informant, the sources said, Carter “told his fellow inmates that he was involved in the killing of a policeman. He did not say Bailey. He used the location - 74th and Evans.”
Carter was questioned earlier this month, making a statement to police and prosecutors that he intended to rob Bailey, but Bailey pulled a gun and the two exchanged gunfire, the sources said.
In February 2009, Carter began serving a three-year prison sentence at Stateville Correctional Center in Joliet for aggravated battery to a peace officer. Carter was on parole in that case at the time of Bailey’s murder, according to Illinois prison records. He was sent back to prison last September after apparently violating his parole in the aggravated battery case.
At Bailey’s memorial service last year, angry speakers decried the violence that had taken the lives of three officers in two months. “Michael Bailey served and protected us,” Daley told the gathering at St. Sabina Church. “He came from our community.”
Earlier this month, the Chicago Sun-Times quoted unnamed sources who said Chicago Police detectives thought there was enough evidence to charge a suspect in the case but that prosecutors were holding off until Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez returned from a conference in Hawaii.
At the time, Dan Kirk, the state’s attorney’s chief of staff, said charges weren’t filed because the case was not complete, not because Alvarez was in Hawaii.
Before the charges against Carter were announced, Officer Bailey’s name was in the news Tuesday because of a paperwork mistake at the Chicago Police Department.
The slain cop’s name was included on a list of low-performing officers sent to supervisors earlier this month. Their work activity, according to the memo, was “lower than other officers performing the same assignment” from Jan. 1 through June 6. Bailey had already been dead for months. The list - with other officers’ names besides Bailey’s blacked out - was recently posted on the Second City Cop blog, which comments on the Chicago Police Department. The anonymous blog demanded an apology from the department. On Tuesday, police Supt. Garry McCarthy said about the mistake: “It’s embarrassing, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But by the same token, it’s a mistake, not a mistake of the heart.”
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