Crime & Safety

Romeoville Cop Disabled by Watching Autopsy Wants Line-of-Duty Pension

A former Romeoville detective claiming an autopsy left him so traumatized that he turned into an alcoholic and can no longer do police work wants a line-of-duty pension and medical benefits.

A former Romeoville police detective claims he was plunged into alcoholism by the trauma of witnessing an autopsy and wants to receive a line-of-duty disability pension for the rest of his life.

Dave Darguzis, who testified to witnessing "a minimum of 75 to 100 autopsies" during his 18-year career with the department, already collects $37,390.80 a year in not-on-duty disability pension.

But Darguzis wants to be bumped up to the $48,608.04—plus medical insurance—he would get with a line-of-duty disability pension.

The Romeoville Police Pension Board denied Darguzis. He has petitioned the Will County Circuit Court to make the board give him another shot.

Dasrguzis' attorney, Keith Carlson, declined to comment on the case.

The autopsy that allegedly left Darguzis with post-traumatic stress disorder and led to his alcoholism was performed on a 4-year-old boy in May 2003.

The child was taken to Edward Hospital in Naperville with severe injuries about his body and then airlifted to Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, where he died.

Darguzis testified during an August 2012 pension board hearing that, but for the 4-year-old's autopsy, he had never been affected by any of the dozens of other autopsies he witnessed as an evidence technician and detective. But none of those procedures were anything like the one done on the child, he said.

The medical examiner was " a specialist in what she does," Darguzis said, "and when the child was taken into the hospital, he was bruised up and down his arms, on his chest, up and down his legs, and she had taken and cut down his arms and filleted the flesh away from his arms all the way flat, and she was cutting into the bruising there to date the bruising, and then she picked him up and turned him over and did the same thing just all the way down his legs, all the way open, filleted him and then dated the bruises on his legs also."

The medical examiner determined the child had been beaten over a long period of time, Darguzis said.

"The case was overwhelming me," he said. "I couldn’t—I couldn’t—there was a lot of evidence that I tried to get together and it was just difficult getting it together."

During the police investigation, the boy's father said the child was injured when he slipped in the bathtub, Darguzis testified, but the father's girlfriend claimed the boy was beaten for wetting himself.

No criminal case was ever brought in connection with the child's death. Prosecutors "didn’t pursue charges on the father, stating that there wasn’t enough evidence," Darguzis said. The failure to resolve the case also contributed to his alcoholism, he said.

During the August 2012 hearing, Darguzis said he was fired after a drunken, off-duty 2008 incident at a forest preserve.

Darguzis testified that he is actually able to work, that he became certified to drive a forklift and found a job with a temp agency "for a while." He blamed his lack of employment not on his alcoholism or post-traumatic stress disorder, but on the "economy."

Even with the more than $3,000 a month he receives for his disability pension, Darguzis said at the hearing that his family is in dire financial straits.

"We are basically broke, he said. "I mean, we—I try to get odd jobs here and there. (His wife) works with the bus company and we manage check-to-check. Let’s put it that way."


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