Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • Page 15

1 'V qmvqjmmqpmymqmmqpummmmm n. INSIDE SECTION 2 City watch ...2 Metropolitan report 3 Metro state roundup 7 Obituaries 8,9 Almanac 9 Weather 10 Newsftvm CHICAGO AND THE NORTH AND WEST SUBURBS along with reports from around the region. BIlUlO Tuesday March 28, 1995 Teacher may lose Ms job EricZorn Steinmetz coach suspended for helping students cheat Shadows of doubt cast executions in different light By Jacquelyn Heard and llaina Jonas Tribune Staff Writers A visibly incensed Chicago Public Schools chief on Monday called for the firing of Steinmetz High School teacher Jerald Plecki, who has admitted to helping his students cheat at a prestigious state academic com- petition last year. "Cheating is a serious infraction in any educational institution and something I will not tolerate," Supt. Argie Johnson said in announcing that Plecki has been suspended with pay.

Suspicions that Steinmetz students, under Plecki's leadership, cheated at this year's Illinois Academic Decathlon resulted in being held. He admitted he gave the answers to his students. The decathlon association has offices at Young High School. Also Whitney Young Principal Powhatan Collins serves on the decathlon board of directors. Johnson called the actions of the 43-year-old English teacher "distressing," and said that school officials have already begun the long, complicated legal journey to fire him, including launching an investigation into Steinmetz's performance at this year's decathlon.

She acknowledged that it could take months to remove Plecki from the school system due to the arduous dismissal process school officials must See Steinmetz, Page 6 the school, last week being stripped of its state championship title. Meanwhile, a consultant for Steinmetz said he will call for a full investigation into the history of the Illinois Academic Decathlon Association, particularly its ties to Whitney Young High School, which has taken top honors in the rigorous contest for nine consecutive years. Young, which came in second in the marathon of test-taking on March 11, ascended to the top spot after a faculty member accused Steinmetz of cheating. That accusation prompted the investigation that resulted in Steinmetz losing its title. On Friday, Plecki said that at last year's decathlon, he found the answers to the final segment of the competition lying on a desk in a classroom at Young, where the competition was Conveyors of trash The city's new blue-bag recycling plan throws a lot of business to makers of conveyor belts.

Page 2 Hand is identified Police say whoever killed Stacey Frobel, whose legs and skull were found, tried hard to hide it. Page 7 i. r- -'rFi The comfort zone surrounding the death penalty in Illinois is about to get smaller. In each of the three non-volunteer executions in the state since the resumption of capital punishment John Gacy last year and James Free and Hernando Williams last week there was no doubt among sane individuals that the condemned had committed vicious murders. Such certainty created an emotional buffer that insulated those with perhaps mixed feelings about capital punishment from the natural, moral aversion to strapping down a human being and killing him.

But not all executions will be as easy to shrug off. Sooner or later sooner, as it turns out, in Illinois one of those messy cases will come along. A case in which troubling questions hang over the prosecution and in which the condemned's protestations of innocence ring at least just plausibly enough to make us wonder whether an irrevocable execution is really the right and necessary step. Such a case is the story of Girvies Davis, 37, the next in line to be executed in Illinois. You've seen and heard very little about him locally because the crime for which he is scheduled to be killed May 17 occurred in Downstate 'V- ft A 'i 1 .711.

JM I mm ftmktm I 'l Daley is confident Thirty-seven state lawmakers line up behind his re-election. Page 3 SB, I Belleville, near St. Louis, in 1978. Is he an innocent man? No. He has long acknowledged and acknowledged again in a phone interview from Death Row over the weekend his Hofer free to go home Figure in Olds' case thinking of Germany Confessions comprise virtually the entire case against Girvies Davis.

I J. -i Tribune photo by Charles Chemey "There never is a problem," says Zophia Arkuszewski, who owns the Oh Henry tavern in the Avondale neighborhood. 1 i 9. -r a 'There are racial undertones to the question: Is the Oh Henry a harmless neighborhood institution or a gang Bar in changing area might face last call 1 1 '-i 4 By Bernie Mixon Tribune Staff Writer After spending the last 10 months behind bars accused of the 1993 murder of Suzanne Olds of Wilmette, Helmut Car-sten Hofer was finally set free Monday. Hofer, a German national, had been in jail on $25,000 cash bond for an immigration violation since Friday, when a jury acquitted him of the murder.

After a two-hour hearing Monday, an immigration judge lowered Hofer's bond to $3,500 which supporters promptly postedand gave him 30 days to leave the country voluntarily or be deported and barred from reentering the United States for five years. Hofer's supporters were unable to post the $25,000 bond set Friday. "I'm going home and start a new life," an elated Hofer, 26, said following Judge Robert D. Vinikoor's decision. "I like the United States.

I think it is a great country. The system works." The immigration ruling removed the last legal hurdle barring Hofer's return to his homeland. Hofer, who began the day dressed in green prison garb and restrained by handcuffs, appeared at a news conference following the ruling looking self-assured in black pants, red shirt and a grey sweater tossed over his shoulders. He maintained his innocence, expressed his gratitude to the jury that acquitted him Friday and looked forward to resuming his life. Gone were the tears he shed following Vinikoor's decision that he would be released to re- See Hofer, Page 5 participation in two i armed robberies in which victims were slain.

He denies being the actual killer (a survivor in one of the robberies did not pick him out of a lineup as the shooter) but has accepted and been sentenced to extended prison terms for his accountability in those crimes. Davis was a hard, bad man who led a hard, bad life. He was one of eight children who grew up in poverty in East St. Louis "a poor pathetic boy who just sat there and said nothing," according to his 4th grade teacher, Annie Quinley Petchulat, the last teacher he had before he tumbled into the juvenile justice system. He was a purse snatcher, he said, a petty thief, a burglar, an alcoholic and a re-seller of stolen goods.

He was 21 when, in August 1979, he and one or more accomplices held up an East St. Louis auto parts store. In the resulting shootout with the owner, a clerk was killed and Davis was wounded. He was later arrested at a hospital Police said that 10 days later, Davis called investigators to his jail cell very late one night and gave them a handwritten list of crimes he said he had participated in. Police took him out of his cell, drove him around town looking for "evidence," and eventually came away with a series of written confessions that cleared the books on several murders.

The confessions were written by police, and signed by Davis at around 4 a.m. A problem with this account is that Davis was illiterate. He couldn't read and couldn't write anything other than his name, according to Richard Cosey, his longtime juvenile parole officer. Another problem is that some of the crimes on the list he allegedly wrote were later proven to have been committed by others. And still another is that the middle-of-the-night timing of the confessions tends to lend credence to Davis' claim that he was taken by surprise from his cell and coerced into confessing to, among other crimes, the then unsolved home invasion and slaying of 89-year-old Charles BiebeL It is for this crime alone that he is sentenced to die.

Davis said that police took him out of the squad car, removed his shackles and told him he could either sign the confessions or try to escape implying, he said, that they would kill him as he ran. These confessions, which Davis says were false, comprise virtually the entire case against him in the Biebel murder and one other murder for which he remains unsentenced and also denies responsibility. Desperate and phony excuses? Could well be. A jury (from which prosecutors excluded all blacks) found him guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, after all, and sentenced him to die (thought only after prosecutors told them their sentencing decision was advisory only). But still, there isn't enough proof that Girvies Davis himself murdered anyone or intended that anyone be murdered to allow a fair and cautious person to push the plunger that will end his life.

At the very least shouldn't we at least 'A By Ben Grove Tribune Staff Writer It's Friday night at the Oh Henry, and Zophia Arkuszewski is tending to her only two customers. On this nippy evening, the bar's heater isn't working, so she pours them complimentary shots of Polish vodka to ward off the chill. The quiet, triangle-shaped tavern in Avondale on Chicago's Northwest Side is adorned with white lace curtains and leftover balloons and flowers from a recent birthday party. On the door, however, ominous red graffiti from a Latino gang is hidden behind a recently hung beer poster. The contrasting images-peaceful and violent shed light on a persistent controversy among Avondale's residents: Is the Oh Henry a harmless neighborhood institution or a gang hangout that breeds trouble? In an ethnically changing neighborhood such as Avon-dale the Oh Henry is located on Kimball Avenue, roughly the east-west dividing line between working-class Polish residents and an emerging Mexican population the question's racial undertones might easily lead to But the debate over the Oh Henry has done as much to bring Poles and Hispanics together as create ethnic tension.

Hundreds have joined forces to shut the tavern down. They accuse it of being a source of drug dealing, gun violence and fights so fierce that they have stopped traffic. The campaign may near an end Tuesday when the latest and possibly last in a yearlong series of hearings will Tribune photo by Val Mauenga Jim Hodges (from left), Terry DelGiudice, Abraham Aich and Ray Rosel want to see the Oh Henry closed. be held before the Mayor's Li- Chicago neighborhoods is cense Commission, which often accompanied by con-could decide Oh Henry's fate flict, the struggles do not al-within a month. ways play out along racial The controversy shows that while the ethnic evolution of See Bar, Page 5 Grant will give U.S.

history teacher some time to study By Bonnie Miller Rubin Tribune Staff Writer Earl Bell is doing what he does best: probing, pushing, stretching the boundaries of his students' intellectual curiosities. In the U.S. history class he teaches at the University of Chicago's Laboratory Schools, 10th and 11th graders are learning about the Industrial Revolution a dawning of a new era. one of 27 in the country out of 300 applicants he'll use his year 'Off to study the role of women in the conservation movement. "When colleges ask students who had the greatest impact on the way they look at the world, his name is the one that is almost always mentioned," said Lucinda Lee Katz, director of the schools.

"He hears it I hear it Now the public knows it" Bell's curriculum relies on lively argument, rather than the memorization of names and dates that make many history classes dry as dust Belt 57, has often held mock constitutional conventions and has had students play the parts of politicians, all for the sake of a lesson. But don't confuse a dynamic For Bell, a former University Park mayor and a recent winner of a $30,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant, it also is a new era. Next fall, he will be missing from the second-floor classroom, where he has been a fixture for the last 28 years and where many future leaders first learned the power of persuasion. As a recipient of the grant- teaching style for touchy-feely gimmickry. Even here, in the rigorous atmosphere of the Lab Schools, his class is legendary for its toughness.

"He was an extremely demanding teacher," said John Rogers, a businessman and president of the Chicago Park District Board. "He taught us how to take a strong stand and how See BeiI, Page 6 insist that tales of execution conclude with an exclamation pointnot a question mark?.