Criminal charges dropped against whistleblower cop
Criminal charges against a retired Illinois police sergeant were dropped this week, four years after he exposed a squad car video that showed his fellow officers slapping and cursing at a Black man who later died of a drug overdose.
Javier Esqueda, who worked at the police department in Joliet, Illinois, for nearly 30 years, had been charged with felony official misconduct after sharing the video of 37-year-old Eric Lurry’s arrest with a Chicago television reporter in 2020.
A Kendall County judge dismissed the charges earlier this week.
Esqueda was featured in Paste BN’s 2021 series “Behind the Blue Wall,” an investigation into more than 300 cases of police officers who said they suffered retaliation after speaking out against misconduct in their departments.
“The false charges against me forced my early retirement,” Esqueda, 55, said in a statement. “It has denied me additional employment. It has denied me participation in activities with my son’s Cub and Boy Scouts troop. It has limited my freedom to cross state lines without permission. Lastly, it made me lose faith in the legal system that I worked collaboratively (with) for so many years to achieve justice within the legal framework.”
Kendall County State’s Attorney Eric Weis, who filed a motion asking the judge to dismiss the charges a few days before a scheduled trial, did not return a phone call.
In a 2021 interview, Esqueda told Paste BN he became a pariah among his fellow officers after he leaked the video, which showed officers slapping Lurry, restricting his breathing, and shoving a baton into his mouth.
Officers suspected Lurry had been hiding drugs in his mouth and removed small plastic baggies containing white powder. But according to additional recordings later released by Joliet police, they drove to the police station instead of a hospital even though at least one of them suspected he had swallowed drugs.
The officers involved received minor departmental discipline, but were cleared of criminal wrongdoing. A civil suit filed by Lurry’s widow, Nicole Lurry, against the city and individual officers remained pending as of Tuesday.
One of the officers, a sergeant, told investigators he thought Lurry was faking illness. The sergeant, who slapped Lurry and called him a “bitch,” was allowed to review the squad video before talking to investigators.
The incident and public outrage surrounding it prompted the Illinois attorney general to launch an investigation into possible systemic civil rights violations by the Joliet Police Department. Last week, the attorney general’s office released a report saying the department had used “unreasonable force, including tasers, head strikes, and other types of force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution” and had engaged in discriminatory policing against Black residents and women.
A Joliet police spokesman did not return a telephone call. On his website, Attorney General Kwame Raoul said “meaningful changes” had occurred since Terry D’Arcy was elected mayor of Joliet in April 2023.
Among the criminal charges dismissed this week was an allegation that Esqueda had used his department-issued laptop to illegally access the video of Lurry. Esqueda told Paste BN in 2021 that if the incident had still been under investigation, the system would not have allowed him to open the video file. He pulled it up, he said, because he’d heard it was bad and was concerned because one of his trainees was involved.
“I was falsely accused of committing crimes when I simply exposed truths,” Esqueda’s statement says. “This persecution from the Joliet Police Department’s previous administration and follow-through from the state’s attorney’s office had a tremendous impact on every facet of my life.”
Gina Barton is an investigative reporter at Paste BN. She can be reached at (262) 757-8640 or gbarton@gannett.com. Follow her on X @writerbarton and Bluesky @writerbarton.bsky.social.