Two Fox Lake men, Preston Shrewsbury and Manuel Vargas, claim police improperly detained, searched and questioned them regarding the Lt. Joe Gliniewicz death investigation September 2015. His death was later discovered to be a “fictional murder” by suicide by the disgraced Fox Lake police officer. Gliniewicz apparently took his life after submitting a false police radio report that he was pursuing three suspicious men: two white males and one black male on his own in a desolate area of Fox Lake. The radio transmission, combined with the discovery of his body with a gunshot wound, sparked a massive manhunt involving more than 100 police officers from surrounding agencies. The search caused the lockdown of local businesses, schools and residents in their own homes who feared killers were at larges.
Preston Shrewsbury and Manuel Vargas filed a federal civil rights lawsuit Monday. The civil rights lawsuit names the following defendants: the villages of Fox Lake and Libertyville, former Fox Lake police chief Michael Behan, and 17 officers including a Libertyville detective. The lawsuit alleges false arrest, and unlawful search and seizure.
Preston Shrewsbury and Manuel Vargas say police targeted immediately after Gliniewicz’s Sept. 1, 2015 death, which police originally claimed they suspected was a murder.
While several police officers close to the case were suspicious about the scene and circumstances of the case, it wasn’t until two months later that authorities determined and publicly announced that the 52-year-old veteran officer, Lt. Joe Gliniewicz, died of a second self-inflicted gunshot wound that he shot, after he shot himself in his vest with a first shot. Police say he staged his death because of fear or shame related to his embezzlement of funds from a youth police explorer program he supervised would become public.
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