City Council committee OKs $3.5 million settlement in fatal squad car crash with SUV

Family matriarch Betty Salters was shopping for the Thanksgiving dinner she loved to cook when the SUV she was riding in was struck by a squad car speeding through a South Side intersection to assist with a nearby arrest.

Salters and her two-year-old granddaughter, who were riding in the backseat, were thrown from a rear passenger window that blew out on impact during the November, 2005 accident at the intersection of 63rd and Saint Lawrence.

Salters was dead on arrival at Cook County Hospital. Two-year-old Quintaniya Jackson suffered a head injury, but has largely recovered.

Today, a City Council committee approved a $3.5 million settlement to compensate the Salters family for the loss of a 56-year-old woman who had cared for two adult daughters with learning disabilities and served as foster mother to two grandchildren.

Chicago Police Lt. Albert Wolf, who blew through a red light at “upwards of 60 m.p.h.,” according to plaintiffs and witnesses, was suspended for just two days.

“He was traveling too fast for conditions. He failed to have his emergency equipment in operation. He said he was responding to an emergency call from a fellow officer involved in a drug stakeout, but he never communicated his intention to respond” to supervisors, said Melvin Brooks, an attorney representing the Salters family.

“The incident the lieutenant claimed he was responding to turned out to involve two individuals arrested for municipal ordinance violations. No one’s life was in danger. No drugs were recovered. It was not necessary for this lieutenant to recklessly and haphazardly respond. It was not an emergency situation.”

First Deputy Corporation Counsel Karen Seimetz said Wolf maintained that he did activate his emergency lights and sirens, contradicting plaintiffs and witnesses.

“Police vehicles are authorized to act as emergency vehicles in certain situations if they have their emergency equipment activated. In this case, obviously, there was a dispute about whether or not the officer did,” Seimetz said.

“He was going to assist another officer with an arrest, but he did not call it in to dispatch.”

Seimetz noted that the $3.5 million settlement was agreed to after mediation and pales by comparison to the $9 million originally demanded.

“Betty Salters was more or less the matriarch of this family. ... She left four adult children, including three daughters, two of whom are learning disabled and relied on their mother very heavily for the day-to-day activities of life,” Seimetz said.

“We have actually resolved the case, we believe, for a reasonable amount, taking into account that it was death of a 56-year-old woman.”