Two years after Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed the mental health clinics, he’s finally allowing his City Council allies to hold a hearing on them sometime this month.
In fact, the mayor repeatedly went out of his way to avoid any face-to-face encounters.
“They said they were cousins,” recalls Matthew Ginsberg-Jaeckle, a mental health activist. “Mo said he was a laid-off construction worker and he was pissed off at the 1 percent and had decided to join the Occupy movement. He said he had a cousin struggling with mental health issues.”
Ginsberg-Jaeckle says Mo was funny. “He had me laughing, though I’m not sure if it was from sleep deprivation. He was trying to get me to say something incendiary. He kept saying, ‘We need to take it to the next level.’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you mean. But whatever it is—this is not a place to discuss it.’ I mean, we’re in a jail cell.”
But back to Mo and Gloves. “To prepare for their assignment, the officers researched the NATO summit, obtained covert identities and created a cover story,” say the court documents. “The officers represented that they were cousins; that Officer Chikko lived with her girlfriend; that Officer Uygun lived with his mother and her boyfriend; and that they were both unemployed but looking for jobs.”
In the meantime, the cases against the activists arrested for trespassing on vacant lots in Woodlawn dragged on for about six months before they were dismissed.
