A veteran Chicago police supervisor is the third city cop this week to be arrested on allegations that he used excessive force, authorities said Thursday.
Lt. Wilfredo Roman, a Chicago cop since June 2000, was charged with aggravated battery and official misconduct, both felonies, according to Tandra Simonton, a spokeswoman for the Cook County state’s attorney’s office. He is due to appear for a bond hearing Thursday afternoon in the Leighton Criminal Court building.
The specific allegations against Roman, the tactical lieutenant in the Grand Central patrol district on the far West and Northwest Side, were not immediately made public.
The charges come the day after two other Chicago cops had court appearances for the alleged beating of a 17-year-old boy who they were trying to arrest earlier this year on the South Side after a car chase.
Grand Crossing District Officers Jeffery Shafer and Victor Guebara were charged with aggravated battery and official misconduct in that case. A Cook County judge ordered them released on their own recognizance.
Roman’s arrest now marks at least the fourth time since early August that a Chicago cop has been arrested on felony charges. On Aug. 5, Officer Melvina Bogard, 32, was charged with shooting a man during a long struggle on the Grand Avenue platform downtown last year, scattering Red Line commuters at rush hour.
Bogard was the first cop in about five years to face charges in Cook County stemming from using a gun while on duty.
Records show that Roman has been sued over allegations of misconduct at least three times over the past decade, all before he became a lieutenant, including by a man who claimed he was shot and seriously wounded by police during a foot chase in August 2011.
The plaintiff in that case, Richard Keeler, alleged in his suit filed in U.S. District Court that Roman and at least three other officers chased into an enclosed stairwell on the 900 block of North Parkside Avenue “without good cause,” then shot him twice.
One shot took off his right pinky finger while he was blocking his face, and the other went into his chest, according to court records.
The suit did not specify which officers allegedly fired their weapons.
The lawsuit alleged Keeler was unarmed at the time of the shooting, and that the officers, realizing they’d made a mistake, “knowingly and maliciously gave false information to police investigators” after the shooting, leading to his arrest on charges of aggravated assault.
The lawsuit was settled for $200,000, records show.
Roman was named in another federal lawsuit alleging officers had kicked in the door of a Logan Square apartment with guns drawn in January 2008 and conducted a warrantless search. That suit was settled for $18,000, records show.
Most recently, Roman was named in a lawsuit in Cook County in 2015 alleging he and other officers drew guns on a man and his brother and arrested them without cause in November 2013. When one of the brothers asked Roman why they were being mistreated, Roman allegedly kneed him in the abdomen, according to the suit.
The victim, Edward Matthews was jailed for months awaiting trial and was eventually found not guilty. The lawsuit was settled for $60,000.
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