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Prosecutors played excerpts of Crimo’s videotaped confession in court, showing that detectives repeatedly informed Crimo of his Miranda rights, including his right to a court-appointed attorney.

Brian Bodden, a Highland Park police detective and an investigator for the Lake County Major Crimes Task Force, took the stand Thursday. He initially read Crimo his Miranda rights around 7 p.m. At the time, Crimo verbally waived his rights, though he did not sign the form until more than five hours later.

Bodden testified that Crimo never asked for an attorney, never refused to answer questions and never said he did not want to speak anymore.

At about 8:45 p.m., the video shows, Bodden left the room and was told that Semrad was waiting in the lobby.

“I told the defendant there was an attorney in the lobby that’d been retained for him and asked him if he wanted to speak with him,” Bodden testified.

Under cross examination, Bodden admitted he misspoke — he never told Crimo that a lawyer that had been hired to represent him was in the lobby asking to speak to him.

“You are 100 percent correct, I made a mistake,” Bodden said later.

According to Bodden, Assistant State’s Attorney Ben Dillon, who is one of the lead prosecutors on the case, asked the detective to go back into the interrogation room and confirm that Crimo did not want to speak with Semrad such that he could hear via a live feed.

Shortly before 10 p.m., Dillon and Semrad participated in a three-way phone call with Thomas Durkin, a defense attorney retained by Crimo’s family who was on vacation at the time.

Durkin is an experienced criminal defense attorney, while Semrad is a bankruptcy lawyer whose own firm went bankrupt.

The two attorneys hired by the detainee’s family were again denied access to their client, with Dillon telling them that Crimo would have to specifically invoke his right to an attorney for them to be allowed to speak to him, according to Semrad’s stipulated testimony.

In determining whether someone in custody has waived their right to a lawyer, Illinois judges are supposed to consider the full totality of the circumstances, including the characteristics of the arrestee and the details of the interrogation itself, according to the Illinois Supreme Court, which has interpreted the state constitution’s right to an attorney as even broader than the federal one.

Did Denying Semrad Access To Crimo Violate His Rights?

Arguing at Thursday’s hearing that Crimo had repeatedly waived his right to an attorney, Assistant State’s Attorney Jeff Facklam contended that the state’s constitution’s right to an attorney does not require police to put an attorney in the interrogation room with a detainee who has not asked to talk to a lawyer.

“[Crimo] was not deprived of the information that was crucial for him to waive his rights knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily,” Facklam said, suggesting that knowing that his family had already hired Semrad to represent him was not crucial for Crimo to waive his rights.

Facklam said Crimo emphasized how well he understood that he had a right to an attorney and to remain silent, but the alleged shooter still repeatedly told police that he wanted to keep talking with them.

“Every single time, [Crimo] says, ‘I want to keep talking to you, I might take you up on the lawyer when we’re done,’” Facklam said. “He wanted to talk to the police. He knew he could talk to a lawyer, and he declined.”

Assistant Public Defender Greg Ticsay argued that the admissibility of the interrogation tape does not hinge on whether or not Crimo invoked his right to an attorney, but rather about whether police violated his due rights by refusing to give his retained attorney access to him during the custodial interview.

“Words have meaning,” Ticsay said, comparing the situation to a hypothetical choice of airport transportation.

“If someone says, ‘Oh, by the way, they sent you a limo,’” the defense attorney said, it is different when someone tells you, “‘There’s a cab outside.'”

Ticsay said that police and prosecutors should have put Semrad in the room with Crimo the moment that he showed up at the station, rather than denying retained counsel access to his client during a custodial interview.

“That vitiates his waiver and violates his due process rights,” Ticsay said.

Crimo’s interview at the Highland Park Police Department ended shortly after midnight on July 5 and resumed in the morning.

He tells his interrogators that he is “really parched” and again turns down the chance to make a phone call.

“We are going to get you something to eat,” said Maureen Mazzola, an FBI agent specializing in domestic terrorism who joined Bodden for parts of the questioning.

During the morning interrogation, Crimo said he had memorized his “Miranda” rights and suggested he would be interested in speaking with a lawyer later.

“So I would like, before being transported anywhere else, I would like to discuss with an attorney,” Crimo says during the morning interview. “I’m not trying to stop talking, I would just like the security of asking for some legal advice”

Crimo is visibly relieved, laughing nervously after Bodden reassures him that he will not be transferred to the Cook County Jail.

“I don’t want to get stuck in a situation where I can’t talk to an attorney,” he said.

Instead of testifying, Semrad had Crimo’s defense attorneys read out a series of statements about what he would have testified.

Crimo’s father contacted Semrad while FBI agents were searching the property, and the attorney went over to the Crimo home while the alleged mass shooter was still on the run, according to the stipulated testimony.

After learning of Crimo’s arrest, Semrad went to the police station and identified himself as the attorney for the alleged gunman.

He remained at the station until 11:45 p.m. and maintained contemporaneous notes of the situation, the bankruptcy attorney hired by Crimo’s father would have testified.

Former School Resource Officer Testifies

In addition to the argument over whether to exclude the portions of Crimo’s interrogation that took place after Semrad showed up at the police station, Thursday’s hearing featured testimony from Sgt. Brian Soldano, a Highland Park police officer who previously served as a school resource officer and said he interacted with Crimo briefly in middle and high school.

Prosecutors want the judge to allow Soldano to tell a jury he recognizes Crimo’s features from security footage allegedly showing him dressed in a skirt and makeup to cover up his face tattoos, walking up a ramp moments before the attack and running down and dropping a rifle shortly after.

Soldano said he recognized Crimo by “the distinct way — the shape of his face, the longer, slender nose, the chin, his body build and his canter, for lack of a better term, his walk.”

The officer said had no memory of his subject of a 30-minute meeting he had with Crimo, his father and former Edgewood Middle School Principal Matt Erickson back in 2014.

The former Highland Park High School school resource officer testified that he remembered seeing Crimo in the dean’s office on occasion, and he also remember that he had once been reported skateboarding through the school.

“Obviously, that’s not a crime, so I didn’t get involved in that, other than attempting to locate him,” Soldano said.

In a September 2015 incident documented with a police report, Soldano was called in for another meeting with Crimo and his father after a school staffer suspected the teen was under the influence of alcohol or drugs. The dean searched his backpack and found some cigarettes, and the officer wrote him up on an administrative ticket.

The defense objected to admitting Soldano’s identification, arguing that his prior interactions with Crimo, who dropped out of high school in 2016, were limited and occurred nearly a decade ago.

Rossetti said she would issue a written ruling on both matters by the next hearing in the case, which is scheduled for Dec. 18. The trial is scheduled to begin Feb. 25.

Accused of firing more than 80 rounds at paradegoers from a rooftop, Crimo is awaiting trial at the Lake County Jail on 117 felony charges — 48 counts each of attempted murder and aggravated battery, as well as 21 counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Katherine Goldstein, 64; Irina McCarthy, 35; Kevin McCarthy, 37; Jacquelyn Sundheim, 63; Stephen Straus, 88; Nicolas Toledo-Zaragoza, 78; and Eduardo Uvaldo, 69.

In June, prosecutors gathered shooting victims and their families for what they planned as a combined change-of-plea and sentencing hearing.

Crimo made sheriff’s deputies bring him into court in a wheelchair before he declined to finalize his guilty plea, so the sentencing hearing never occurred. He then declined to leave his cell for the next two court hearings, prompting warnings that his trial and sentencing could go ahead without his presence.

At Thursday’s hearing, Crimo made a two-fingered hand gesture to the journalists gathered in the jury box as he entered and exited the courtroom, but he remained silent when asked if he understood the rights he would be waiving if he refused to show up to court.

Last year, Crimo’s father pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges of reckless conduct for signing the consent form that enabled his son to apply for a FOID card from Illinois State Police despite his knowledge of prior warnings about his son’s violent and suicidal behavior. He spent four weeks in Lake County Jail and remains on probation.

As Highland Park Patch was first to report, Crimo’s father declared bankruptcy shortly before entering his negotiated guilty plea. He went with the Ottenheimer Law Group of Buffalo Grove, rather than the firm of the bankruptcy attorney who showed up to his house while his son was on the run.

Also known as Debtstoppers, Semrad Law Firm is the largest consumer bankruptcy firm in the state and co-owned by Semrad and his brother, whose law license has been suspended indefinitely.

The Semrads’ firm declared bankruptcy itself last year after receiving nearly $4 million in Paycheck Protection Program and outsourcing its workforce to a Bulgarian firm in which they had a financial interest. Before filing for Chapter 11 — but after getting the first of its forgivable coronavirus relief loans — the Chicago Sun-Times reported Semrad Law spent more than $332,000 on a trio of sports utility vehicles and became the target of federal investigations over unpaid employee benefits and payroll taxes.

After the accused shooter is shown Semrad’s business card and asked to confirm he understood that the attorney was in the lobby he says, “Oh yes. But, you know, maybe for a little nice, uh, domestic case but that’s it.”

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