![]() "She got really upset and started to cry, so I asked them to stop." And she wanted to give them the information, but she was absolutely blindsided and had no idea," Kruger says. "The police kept asking her if she knew what had happened. Even though Kruger didn't yet know an officer had injured Zidek, she says she noticed the police weren't doing anything to comfort the victim. In the aftermath of the crash, Kruger says, Zidek lay with the left side of her face and shoulder on the asphalt, her hips rotated toward the ground. Zidek, a DePaul undergraduate, was on her way home from work at a Starbucks near Wellington and Broadway when she was struck, according to a male relative who asked not to be named, citing fears of police retaliation. However, Zidek's attorney says the truth about the crash has yet to be determined, and that the police department's refusal to accept responsibility is yet another example of our city's larger problem of police accountability. The Chicago Police Department now argues that Zidek was at fault, claiming that she ran her stop sign, and that the officer who hit her had activated his emergency lights before he went through the intersection. Photo courtesy of the Zidek family Annie Zidek in the hospital after the crash. But the motorist who injured the cyclist was actually an as yet unnamed police officer who sped through the intersection at Wellington and Racine-which has four-way stop signs-en route to a burglary call.Īnnie Zidek in the hospital after the crash. Kruger says she then assumed Zidek had been the victim of a hit-and-run. Zidek's backpack, phone, and one of her shoes were scattered across the street. She says she thought Zidek had been shot, but as she approached the teen, she saw a dented and broken bicycle and realized that she had been struck on her bike. "I thought it was a gunshot, or a car had hit a light pole," she recalls.Īs Kruger went to her first-floor window, she heard a short burst of police sirens, then silence again, followed by a young woman crying, "Help, someone please help me." On the west side of Racine she saw 19-year-old Annie Zidek lying on the pavement, surrounded by four or five Chicago police officers. Around 11 PM on Wednesday, January 18, Abigail Kruger was sitting on her couch in her Lakeview duplex, just south of Wellington and Racine, when the evening's quiet was shattered by a loud bang.
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