By Ruth Fuller and John Byrne
The Chicago Tribune
LIBERTYVILLE, Ill. — Marilyn Foutes thought her son had left his troubles behind when they moved to the Chicago suburbs from the West Coast about 18 months ago.
Now she’s convinced she made the phone call to police that cost him his life.
Foutes’ only child, Spencer, 23, had come home Saturday morning agitated after he had been arrested for drunken driving, she said. He became hysterical, punching a wall. Frightened, she called police.
A short time later, her son was dead, shot by a Libertyville police officer. Investigators said Spencer Foutes pointed a gun at officers who had responded to the call.
“It’s my fault,” Marilyn Foutes said. “He would not be dead now. This was not the way it was supposed to end.”
Last year Foutes moved to the Chicago area from northern California to take a job as a project manager with a pharmaceutical delivery company in Lake Forest, where she still works. She grew up Downstate and welcomed the chance to return to Illinois.
Her son had been living in Arizona where he attended community college, but ran into trouble with gangs, Foutes said. He was eager to get a new start with his mother and followed her here, she said. They lived in Buffalo Grove until moving to a townhouse in Libertyville in May.
In the last 1 1/2 years, her son seemed to have escaped the gangs and drugs that dogged him for years, Foutes said. He had been working at a fast-food restaurant until recently, hanging out with friends and thinking about going back to college, she said.
“The last year-and-a-half was fabulous,” Foutes said. “We just bought fishing poles, he had poker buddies -- stuff normal kids do.”
On Saturday, she worried that her son was suffering some kind of psychotic episode. His late father had a history of depression, said Foutes, who divorced him when their son was just 2.
“So I stupidly called police,” she said.
Foutes is questioning not only her own judgment but also police accounts of the first officer-involved shooting in Libertyville in 30 years. She disputes officers’ reports of where police were in the house when her son was fatally shot.
But even Foutes concedes her son was clearly drunk and agitated when he entered their Libertyville home Saturday morning. Earlier that morning, Vernon Hills police had pulled him over for drunken driving while he was on his way to pick up a friend from work, he told his mother. The police dropped him off at home, Foutes said. Vernon Hills police could not be reached for comment Wednesday.
When he punched his bedroom wall, Foutes recalled, “He started to say, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do this.’”
Officers Alex Cardona and Bryan Pletcher were the first to arrive at the Foutes home in the 900 block of Cali Court. According to Libertyville Police Chief Patrick Carey, they walked upstairs and found Spencer Foutes in his bedroom, lying on his bed with a gun in his hand.
Cardona and Pletcher backed out of the bedroom, and Foutes came out into the second-floor hallway, still holding the gun, Carey said. Cardona shouted for Foutes to drop the weapon, the chief said, but the officer opened fire when Foutes pointed the .357-caliber handgun toward two other officers down the stairs on the first floor.
Cardona fired two shots, striking Foutes once in the lower left back, Carey said.
But Marilyn Foutes insisted she was alone on the first floor when she heard gunshots from upstairs at 6 a.m. “All four police were upstairs,” she said.
When she demanded to know what happened to her son, the officers would say only that they had called for an ambulance, Foutes said.
“I thought they winged him,” she said. “I thought he was going to the hospital. I didn’t know he was dead. I thought he would go to the psych ward and get crisis counseling.”
Foutes said she expected police to give her a ride to the hospital to visit her son, but instead she was taken to the Libertyville police station. Police kept her in the dark over the next several hours, Foutes said, as she demanded answers from detectives with the Lake County Major Crimes Task Force.
“I kept asking, ‘What happened to my son? Where’s my son? I need to know what is happening with my son?’” she said. “They didn’t even take me to the hospital. I should have been at the hospital with my son, but they were intimidating. I thought there was no way they would let me sit there if he wasn’t OK.”
Officials from the task force did not respond Wednesday to requests for comment.
About 10 a.m., after Marilyn Foutes signed a written statement about the shooting, two chaplains from Most Blessed Trinity Church in Waukegan told her that her son had died, she said.
He had been pronounced dead at 6:59 a.m. at Advocate Condell Medical Center in Libertyville. His blood-alcohol level was 0.25, three times the legal limit [for driving], Lake County Coroner Richard Keller said.
Lake County State’s Atty. Michael Waller, whose office will ultimately rule on whether the shooting was justified, said all four officers reported two were upstairs and two downstairs when Cardona opened fire. Even if Marilyn Foutes was correct that all four officers were upstairs at the time of the shooting, Waller said, that still might not change the fact that the officers believed their lives were in danger and were justified in shooting her son.
“We still have an extremely intoxicated person pointing a weapon at police officers,” Waller said.
Foutes said she is concerned more with the loss of her son than assigning blame. “I can’t get my head around this,” she said. “I called for help and this is what happened? My son is lying somewhere dead. He just started a great turn in his life. How could it go so wrong?”
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