Victim in 1992 bat attack runs tea company

Andrew Buckman was a teenager when he was hit in the head with a baseball bat outside then-Mayor Richard M. Daley’s summer home at an underage beer bash in Grand Beach, Mich., nearly 21 years ago, suffering severe brain injuries.

Today, Buckman and his wife own a tea-importing company — Great Horse Teas, whose website describes it as “a small tea company dedicated to sourcing our teas directly from growers/ producers in China, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, West Africa and various other locations.”

Buckman, 36, and his wife, Katrina, declined to talk about the of the police reports the department has released to indicate that any member of Daley’s security detail had any involvement in the Koschman case.

That wasn’t the case nearly 21 years ago, at the time of another incident in which Vanecko, then just a teenager, was involved.

Daley’s son Patrick, then 16, had thrown a beer bash at his family’s summer home in Grand Beach, Mich. It ended after a fracas in which another teen was hit in the head with a baseball bat outside the home and ended up hospitalized with brain injuries.

The mayor was in New York, but the police chief in Grand Beach, Mich., knew who to call: Daley’s security detail.

“I had orders at the time to never call the mayor directly — to always get them through the detail,” Chief Dan Schroeder recalls.

Schroeder tried to contact Michael Marano, then head of Daley’s detail, hours after the March 1, 1992, fight. Instead, he reached Gregory Ramirez, another officer on the detail, according to Michigan State Police records.

Marano and Ramirez resigned from Daley’s detail in 1997 after the Chicago Sun-Times revealed they were also running a security com- 1992 incident. His mother said in a brief interview in 2011 that her son made a complete recovery.

Buckman’s parents filed a federal lawsuit against Mark Lawler, a high school classmate of Daley’s son, Patrick Daley, seeking damages from Lawler for hitting Buckman in the head with the bat. They also sued Patrick Daley, who threw the party; the mayor’s nephew, Richard J. “R.J.” Vanecko, who wielded a shotgun during the brawl; and two other teens who brought beer to the Daley house. The suit was settled out of court.

Charged in the assault, Lawler said he hit Buckman in selfdefense. A jury convicted Lawler, pany that got government business from city-related agencies.

The Michigan police records show this exchange took place during the call from Schroeder to the mayor’s security detail:

Schroeder: I’m trying to get a hold of the mayor, I need to talk to him, we had a fracas out here last night involving his son. . . .

Ramirez: Could you fill me in on the details, um, the mayor is also in New York with Mike. . . .

Schroeder: OK, what happened was apparently Pat and some of his friends were having a party up there and, um, ah, a friend of Pat’s had brought some other friends over from Michigan City. Ramirez: OK. Schroeder: OK, and apparently, ah, they weren’t welcome there, there was some racial slurs back and forth.

Ramirez: Were they black kids or something like that?

Schroeder: They were Filipino kids . . . And they were told to get out and on the way out one of them, one of the Filipino kids, got sucker punched. . . . So they decided they wanted some revenge. So they had come back later on with reinforcements and there was a fracas in the driveway. One kid from the Daley house had brandished a weapon.

Ramirez: What kind of weapon, then 16, of assault and infliction of serious injury. He got probation and paid $800 in fines.

Lawler — who grew up in Beverly and met Patrick Daley at Mount Carmel High School — was found dead in a hotel room in Miami Beach on Christmas Eve of 2009. He was 34 and died of a heart problem, the medical examiner found.

Patrick Daley pleaded guilty to a juvenile charge of furnishing alcohol to minors. Vanecko, then 17, pleaded guilty to aiming a firearm without malice. Both got probation. Tim Novak, Chris Fusco

and Carol Marin

Schroeder: I think it’s a .20-gauge shotgun. Nobody’s admitting to it and I didn’t see it . . . That was somebody from the Daley clan up there. Ramirez: OK. Schroeder: Then the worst part is somebody up there also took a baseball bat and cracked one of the kids in the head. Ramirez: Holy Christ. Schroeder: Yes, he’s in the hospital. He’s had brain surgery this morning. . . . Like I say, it’s getting around so I need to talk to the mayor.

Ramirez: Yeah, okay. Well, I’ll call Mike back in New York right now and I’ll have him advise him from here what’s going on.

During their investigation, the Michigan police learned that Patrick Daley and Vanecko, then 17, had gone to a basement closet and grabbed the shotgun. Vanecko apparently assembled it and went outside, where Daley’s friends were fighting with another group of teens — including 15-year-old Andrew Buckman — who had come back to the party with the two Filipino teens.

Mark Lawler, one of Daley’s classmates from Mount Carmel High School, hit Buckman in the