By Lauren FitzPatrick
Chicago Sun-Times
CHICAGO — A gray Nissan kept turning up outside Chicago Police patrolman Lance Handzel’s home on a quiet block in Chicago’s Southwest Side, scaring his family.
It circled his home a few times in October 2010, rounding the block, according to Cook County prosecutors. One of its occupants, Trini Morado, stopped and stared down Handzel’s wife, Nicole, and their 7-year-old daughter, prosecutors said.
On Thursday, the Handzels got to testify at the sentencing of the 6-foot-tall, 305-pound Morado, where their stalking case was used by prosecutors to ask for a stiffer sentence on a kidnapping charge against Morado.
Morado, 39, of the 5100 block of Normandy in Chicago, was given 18 years in prison in Cook County Circuit Court in Maywood.
Lance Handzel believed that the stalking resulted from an arrest he made as an on-duty patrolman in April 2010. He said he was responding to multiple 911 calls reporting fighting or flashing of gang signs at a park and collared Morado’s 14-year-old nephew.
Morado and his 23-year-old nephew, Steven Morado, were arrested in early November and charged with stalking; by Thanksgiving, graffiti marred the Handzels’ garage door: “You Die Cop,” it read.
“They have put my family in jeopardy,” Nicole Handzel said at home after the hearing, sitting with her mother-in-law.
“If it was for the arrest in April [2010], he was doing his job,” she said of her husband.
“We don’t know what to do anymore.”
They’ve since put their 5-year-old son in a full-day school program, not wanting him to be home alone with his mom during the day. They’ve installed an alarm system.
Cases still are pending against Steven Morado, who also was his uncle’s co-defendant in the kidnapping case.
The Morados were accused of kidnapping two Riverside teenagers in February 2010, believing their friend burglarized a family member’s apartment. They were out on bail when they were charged with stalking.
Trini Morado Sharon Handzel, mother of Chicago Police Officer Lance Handzel, and his wife, Nicole, show a photograph of their garage door with the words “You Die Cop” scrawled on it.
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