On a quiet night in Waukegan, just before midnight on October 20, 2020, Tafara Williams and Marcellis Stinnette were sitting in a parked car outside her home. There was nothing unusual about the scene. The car was near the intersection of Liberty and Oak Streets, in front of the house where Williams lived. Stinnette was 19 years old, with his whole life still ahead of him. Williams was a young woman, a mother, someone who had every reason to expect a normal evening. But the night was shattered when Waukegan Police Officer James Keating pulled up beside them. He did not activate his emergency lights, and he did not block their car in. He asked Stinnette about an accident, demanded his name, then walked around to the passenger side and told him he was under arrest. When Williams asked why, Keating replied, “Because I said.” Body camera footage later released by the city showed the whole exchange, and it was as raw and unsettling as it sounds. Keating claimed Stinnette had a warrant, but that warrant was from Florida and was not extraditable, meaning Illinois police had no legal authority to arrest him for it. Williams, frightened and confused, drove away. Keating then radioed a stunning falsehood: “Hey, they just ran me over.” Another officer, Dante Salinas, caught up with the car moments later. After a brief pursuit, the car slid off the road near Helmholz Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. Salinas got out and fired into the car as it reversed, striking both Williams and Stinnette. Stinnette was taken to the hospital and pronounced dead. Williams was seriously wounded and would suffer severe, permanent injuries. Now, years later, Williams is the one facing a criminal charge—aggravated fleeing or attempting to elude a peace officer—while her attorneys argue that the entire prosecution was built on the word of a police officer who was fired for lying.
The motion to dismiss Williams’s indictment is a damning account of prosecutorial overreach and withheld evidence. Her attorneys, Blake Horwitz and Jason Dreifuss, filed a motion asking a judge to dismiss the charge with prejudice, which would prevent prosecutors from ever bringing it again. They argue that the grand jury that indicted Williams was deceived and that she was denied due process. The grand jury heard the case on September 21, 2022, immediately after hearing the case against Salinas, who was charged with second-degree murder and involuntary manslaughter in Stinnette’s death. But for Williams, the only witness was an investigator from the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office who was not at the scene and who relied almost entirely on Keating’s police report. That report, according to the motion, was false and misleading in critical ways. The grand jurors were never told that Keating had been fired for making false statements, that his own police chief had concluded he had no legal authority to approach the car and order Stinnette’s arrest, or that Keating’s claim that he had been run over was disproven by video. They were not told that an Illinois State Police LEADS field specialist testified in a 2024 deposition that the Waukegan Police Department did not run any LEADS query on Stinnette until 12:38 a.m. on October 21, 2020, after the shooting, contradicting Keating’s report that he checked the database before ordering Stinnette out of the car. They were not told that a different officer later ran Stinnette’s background and found a Florida warrant that could not be enforced in Illinois. They were not told that Keating had been terminated, twice, for his conduct. In short, the grand jury was asked to trust a report from an officer whose own department had concluded was dishonest.
The details of the investigation are even more disturbing. Keating was fired in March 2022 after the department found he gave false answers during an internal interrogation, denying that a commander had given him a direct order. The department notified Lake County State’s Attorney Eric Rinehart of that finding, saying the misconduct “reflected upon the truthfulness of Keating.” Then-Waukegan Police Chief Keith Zupec issued a second termination letter in July 2022, specifically for Keating’s conduct during the Stinnette encounter. Zupec concluded that Keating had no legal authority to approach Williams’s car or order Stinnette’s arrest because the warrant was not extraditable. The chief also noted that officers receive such warrants frequently and are trained not to act on them. Commander Michael Mandro sent Rinehart a letter on July 26, 2022, with the results of the internal investigation and Zupec’s findings. It was the second time that year the department formally notified prosecutors that Keating had lied in an official report. An arbitrator later upheld Keating’s firing in November 2024, finding that he attempted an unlawful arrest of Stinnette based on a non-extraditable warrant, filed a false, misleading and incomplete report, made a broadcast claiming he had been run over that was disproven by video, violated the department’s pursuit policy by following Williams’s car with his emergency lights off, engaged in “two separate acts of ‘dishonesty,’” and showed “absolutely no remorse.” The arbitrator also found that Keating’s false broadcast led other officers, including Salinas, to believe Williams’s car had hurt him and intentionally targeted him. That false narrative directly contributed to the violence that followed.
Despite all of this, prosecutors presented Williams’s case to a grand jury without mentioning any of it. The motion argues that the grand jury was never told about Keating’s falsified report, his firing, the chief’s warning to prosecutors, or his false radio claim. The motion also argues that no evidence was presented showing Keating ever signaled Williams, rather than Stinnette, to stop, which the charge requires. Attorney Blake Horwitz said prosecutors are required under the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brady v. Maryland ruling to turn over evidence that helps the defense, but they did not. The defense only received the chief’s findings in July 2024, nearly four years after the criminal prosecution began, and only after subpoenaing the Waukegan Police Department. Horwitz said he does not know what prosecutors were thinking when they charged Williams, but he believes the charge was meant to offset the case against Salinas. “My sense of it is we’re going to arrest a cop, we’re going to prosecute a cop, we need to balance this out by arresting somebody else at the scene,” he said. The motion also notes that prosecutors’ instructions to the grand jurors were never transcribed, which makes it impossible to know what they were told off the record. Horwitz answered yes when asked whether prosecutors had conversations with grand jurors that were kept off the record, and he said that would be “fleshed out” in the state’s response. The Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office has said only that it plans to file a response and cannot comment further on a pending case. The City of Waukegan did not respond to a request for comment. The defense is asking the judge to dismiss the indictment or, alternatively, hold a private evidentiary hearing to determine what prosecutors told grand jurors.
The human cost of this case is staggering. Williams was not just a defendant; she was a survivor of a police shooting that killed her boyfriend and left her permanently disabled. She was shot in her right hand and body, and despite multiple surgeries, she does not have the use of her right hand. She has several young children who depend on her. In a press conference, Horwitz described her as courageous. “She is courageous. She’s doing her best to go on in her life,” he said. Williams did not speak because her case is still pending, but her presence was a reminder that the criminal justice system sometimes treats victims as criminals. Horwitz framed the root cause plainly: two African Americans were sitting in a car peacefully when a police officer attempted to arrest someone who should not have been arrested. He said Williams’s decision to drive away came from a legitimate fear that many Black Americans feel in encounters with police, and that her concern was “substantiated by the chief of police.” Meanwhile, Salinas, the officer who fired seven shots into the car, had a separate history of violence. He was sentenced to 60 days in jail after a judge found him guilty of official misconduct in another case in which he punched an unarmed man during a 2019 confrontation. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges in Stinnette’s death. The same system that charged Salinas also charged Williams, and her attorneys argue that is a fundamental injustice. Marcellis Stinnette was 19 years old. He was someone’s son, someone’s boyfriend, someone’s friend. He was killed in a burst of gunfire that should never have happened. His family has had to live with that loss while watching the legal system move slowly, sometimes in the wrong direction.
As the case continues, Williams is still fighting for her name, her freedom, and some measure of justice. Her case was initially set for trial on July 13, but her attorneys asked for a delay in June after uncovering records about Keating and subpoenaing the Waukegan Police Department for more. The defense received the July 26, 2022, letter on July 7 in response to that subpoena. Williams is scheduled to appear in court again on November 2, when a judge is expected to set a hearing date on the motion to dismiss. Her federal civil rights lawsuit against Salinas, Keating, and the city remains pending in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. The lawsuit seeks to hold the officers and the city accountable for the unlawful arrest attempt, the shooting, and the policies and customs that enabled both. Horwitz said the fact that the chief’s findings were kept from the defense for nearly four years “deepens the questions the lawsuit raises about what the City knew, when it knew it, and what it chose not to disclose.” At its core, this case is about trust. Trust in the police to protect and serve. Trust in prosecutors to be honest. Trust in a legal system that is supposed to be fair. But video evidence, internal investigations, and arbitration rulings have all painted a different picture. A police officer who lied, made an unlawful arrest, and set off a chain of events that ended a young man’s life has been fired but not charged. A police officer who fired into a car has been charged but is still awaiting trial. And a woman who was shot, who watched her boyfriend die, and who now lives with permanent injuries is still facing a felony charge. Her attorneys say prosecuting her is not justice. The motion to dismiss asks the court to recognize that the entire case rests on a foundation of falsehoods. Whatever the judge decides, the world has seen what happened. Marcellis Stinnette should still be alive. Tafara Williams should not be carrying the double burden of grief and prosecution. Justice, if it means anything, must begin with the truth.