A time of hope. A violent death.
sons when she could.
Cunningham would not allow police inside the house, but the officer, who insisted on seeing both boys at least in the doorway, reported both appeared “healthy and happy.” Police said they referred the case to DCFS but were told that a call regarding utilities was not grounds alone for an investigation. No further action was taken.
AJ turned 5 the next month.
A suspicious bruise
The family in the rundown house with green shutters had become “the talk of the neighborhood,” said Butler, the neighbor who lived across the street.
Butler said she called authorities a few times to check on the kids in the house because of loud fights, unkempt property, nonworking utilities or a loose dog — a brown boxer named Lucy.
The neighbor recalled witnessing one particularly bad fight between Cunningham and Freund during a winter snowstorm. Butler said the two boys were waiting alone inside a parked car as the adults argued loudly inside the house. Despite the weather, the younger boy was dressed only in a diaper, she said.
The two women exchanged heated words when Cunningham came outside, Butler said.
“I told her she needed to get some help,” Butler recalled. “She told me, ‘Don’t you (expletive) call the cops again.’ She peeled out of there and was gone for a week.”
Another time, Butler said, Cunningham left her a handwritten letter asking her to stop involving police.
“I’m doing the best I can,” Butler said, paraphrasing Cunningham’s letter. “I’m young. I don’t have electricity. I don’t have food for my kids.”
Butler said she dropped off flowers, groceries and a note offering to help. She said Cunningham never responded. “I told her (in the note) I know it’s hard but the people here are nice and will help you,” Butler said.
In November 2018, Cunningham and Nowicki were staying in a Palatine hotel when Nowicki complained to police that she was refusing to let him collect his belongings from their room after a breakup. There were no arrests, and police did not indicate in the report if AJ and his younger brother were there.
It’s unclear how long Cunningham had stayed in the Palatine hotel, but she was living with Freund again in the Crystal Lake house the next month.
Freund agreed to take her back in even though she was pregnant with Nowicki’s child, according to JoAnn Gomez, a longtime friend of Cunningham’s.
“She didn’t have any other place to go,” Gomez said. “Drew let her come back and told her he would raise the baby.”
Freund, she said, “would do anything” for Cunningham. Nowicki soon moved back into the house as well, according to a police report.
On Dec. 18, Cunningham rushed to a nearby Taco Bell and tearfully asked employees to call 911. She accused Nowicki of stealing her cellphone and prescription medications that morning. She said he lived in her home but left one week earlier. AJ and his brother were in the back seat as she stood outside the car and spoke to officers.
Police located Nowicki walking down the street nearby, heading to cash in lottery tickets. He did not have any of Cunningham’s property and said the argument began when she tried to take his medication. Officers arrested Cunningham for driving on a suspended license.
At the Crystal Lake house, police described the home as “cluttered, dirty and in disrepair.” It was littered with clothes, boxes and bags, and the boys’ rooms had an “overwhelming” smell of dog waste and urine. Officers also noticed a large bruise on AJ’s right hip, according to records.
Police called DCFS, noting Cunningham was a former heroin addict who “doesn’t look good and if (she) is clean, she likely hasn’t been for very long.” It was the fourth and final hotline call in 2018. Officers took temporary protective custody of the boys and photographed both the interior of the home and AJ’s bruise as evidence.
A DCFS investigator responded to the police station that afternoon. The investigator, Carlos Acosta, reported in records that AJ said the dog had “put her paw on me” the night before while he and his brother were watching the movie “Polar Express.”
Cunningham told Acosta she wasn’t certain how the injury occurred but that “she had not and never has” hit her son, according to documents reviewed by the Tribune. She volunteered to be tested for illicit drugs.
Acosta allowed her to leave the police station with the kids as long as she took AJ directly to a doctor. She complied. Acosta did not go with them, but records show that he followed up twice by phone while Cunningham was in the emergency room.
Dr. JoEllen Channon, who is not a forensic interview expert or child-abuse specialist, examined AJ. Channon was unable to determine the cause of the bruise, according to DCFS. She said it could be due to a dog, a belt or even a football.
She interviewed AJ alone, records show. Away from his mother, the boy’s story shifted.
“Maybe someone hit me with a belt,” Channon recalled AJ saying, according to DCFS. “Maybe mommy didn’t mean to hurt me.”
Concerned that further prodding by her would compromise the investigation, Channon concluded AJ needed to be questioned by a trained forensic interviewer and examined by a pediatrician, according to records.
Acosta did not seek a second medical opinion, such as from a pediatric doctor certified in abuse-related injuries, or bring in an expert to conduct a forensic interview with the child, records show. Acosta told Cunningham in a telephone call that he would allow the boys to go home from the hospital only if Freund, their father, picked them up and remained with them.
The next day, Acosta made an unannounced home visit and reported that he found the squalid conditions described by police had improved overnight, according to records.
Freund assured Acosta that the boys, both of whom were home, were not in danger and that he and their mother as discipline gave only “an occasional spanking with their open hand over the children’s clothes,” the records said.
Acosta compared notes with Gold, the co-worker who investigated the last hotline call, and checked in with the boys’ primary care physician for their medical history.
On Jan. 4, 2019, Acosta deemed the hotline allegations were unfounded. He had first consulted with his supervisor, Polovin, who was involved in AJ’s two prior hotline investigations, including the day the boy was born with illicit drugs in his system.
Acosta, an elected McHenry County Board member, and Gold and Polovin either did not respond or declined requests for comment. DCFS officials said the employees are not authorized to speak to the media.
Both Acosta and Gold had been assigned a caseload higher than allowed under a decades-old federal consent decree in the month of their contact with AJ’s family, officials said.
At the end of 2018, Cunningham was several months pregnant. Nowicki, meanwhile, began a five-month stint in jail in December over an unrelated aggravated battery arrest.
By the time Cunningham’s fourth child was born, AJ was gone.