Trashed: The death of Michael York and how heroin has invaded the Chicago suburbs

Nearly two years ago, the body of Michael York turned up in an alley on the West Side. The high-school student had died of an apparent overdose after a weekend bacchanal at a St. Charles mansion, and his friends had dumped his corpse in the neighborhood where they bought drugs. Three young people have now been charged in a case that painfully illustrates how heroin has invaded the suburbs

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Cathy Reinert knew something was wrong when she hadn’t heard from her son by Sunday night. “It wasn’t like him not to call me,” she says. On Monday, she filed a missing person report. On Tuesday, a little after noon, a commander with the Elburn Police Department came to her door. “I felt like I’d been hit by a truck, and I’m laying in the street not able to breathe,” Reinert says.

The assumption was that York had overdosed on heroin, but the Cook County coroner’s office could not determine a cause of death. For six months, Reinert tortured herself, wondering what had happened. “Somebody tells you your son’s in an alley in Chicago, and you don’t know how he died, why he died, when he died . . . I didn’t even know any of that. It was the hardest six months of my life.”

Reinert says she was provided little information by Chicago police, who were initially in charge of the investigation. “They never told me anything,” she says. “I called the police station all the time, but I couldn’t even get someone to return my phone call until I wrote [Chief] Jody Weis [saying], ‘Is this how you would want to be treated if it was your child that was found?’ Then they finally called back.”

But for a surprise call, Reinert thinks she might never have learned the truth. One day a friend of her son’s—Robert Fikar, the teenager who had seen York and Green at the check-cashing business the day of Parker’s party—called and said he knew what had happened. Fikar had run into Michael Mangano, and Mangano had told him the entire story, according to information in a search warrant.

“He was just talking about it,” says Fikar, who met with me and Reinert in late September at a Batavia coffee shop. “I kept thinking to myself . . . Something needed to be done.”

Reinert, who threw her arms around Fikar and murmured “thank you” at the coffee shop, says her first reaction to the news was relief. “I had gone six months without knowing. So of course I was [grateful] to find out what had happened,” she says. She immediately called the St. Charles police, who called Fikar. Because the party had occurred in St. Charles, the city’s police department took control of the investigation.

In the weeks that followed, as St. Charles police put together the case, Reinert’s relief turned to rage. “They throw him in an alley, in the snow, face-down, by somebody’s garbage can. How sick is that?”

She agonized over the thought that her son might have been saved had someone at the party called 911 or taken him to a hospital. “He passed away twice, and twice they revived him. [They] were supposed to be his friends. Why didn’t [they] get him help?”

In late January 2009, a little more than a year after York was found, the Kane County state’s attorney charged Billek, Parker, and Green with obstruction of justice. Green was also charged with two counts of supplying heroin—to York and Parker. More serious charges, such as drug-induced homicide, might have been filed, but without an official cause of death, the state’s attorney decided not to try. As this story went to press, Billek and Parker were free on bond. Green remained in jail. Trials are pending in all three cases. If convicted, Green faces up to seven years in jail; Parker and Billek each face up to three years.

When I ask Green whether he feels remorse, he responds in the same matter-of-fact, almost deadpan way he used in describing the events that had put him behind bars. “I would think about it,” he says. “Why would it have to be him and not us, considering we all had the same dope?”

What would he say to York’s mother? “I wish I could tell his mother I’m sorry for what happened. I didn’t do anything purposely,” he says. “I’d tell her, ‘deepest sympathies.’” But then Green quickly spins off into complaints about why he is still being held while his two codefendants are out on much lower bond. “They’re making it sound like I’m some Hannibal Lecter, or some John Gacy or Charles Manson–type person.”

Billek, meanwhile, has struggled. In March, he was arrested after police found a syringe and a cotton ball containing opium in a compartment in his car door. In May, his bond was tripled after he twice tested positive for alcohol in violation of his release conditions. His lawyer, Jeffrey Fawell, told a judge that those incidents were brief relapses and that Billek is “committed to not going down the road he has gone before.”

For her part, Parker tells me she had spent the past few months in rehab, is currently clean, and plans to stay that way, one day at a time. She says she thinks about the events of that December weekend “every day. It’s something you can’t forget—wishing I could have done more. Wishing it didn’t happen. I feel responsible. I feel like I could have done something more. I was just too scared, too freaked out.”

She says she’s aware that there’s little sympathy for her, that some people call her a monster, a spoiled rich girl, and wonder how someone with so much could have become involved in something so reprehensible. To a degree, she says, she understands. On the other hand, she adds, “Money doesn’t mean people don’t have problems. Money doesn’t make you better, it doesn’t make you a good person, it doesn’t make you immune [to addiction].” As for what happened, “no one knows what he or she would do in that situation. Don’t act like you would, because you don’t.”

* * *

Forty-eight miles from the alley where Michael York was found almost two years ago, in the lengthening shadows of a late August afternoon, Cathy Reinert—her three-year-old daughter, Calee, in tow—stands hugging herself against the cool breeze that sweeps the gently sloping grounds of Blackberry Township Cemetery. Other than a slight rustle through the pines and red cedars and spruce trees that shade the bright carpet of grass—and the giggles of Calee—the spot is silent, peaceful.

Reinert bends to pluck a dried flower from an arrangement of red petunias and white bacopa next to a sky-blue plaque embossed with a picture of her son; nearby are a small stone angel and a Matchbox replica of a car belonging to one of York’s friends.

“I went to the alley,” Reinert says, turning her head, gazing for a moment across the scattered blocks of granite markers and polished headstones. “He didn’t take his last breath there, but it was still important to me. I wanted to know where he was.”

In the nearly two years since her son was found face-down in that alley, she has thought a lot about the people who were with him on his last night. She has attended every one of their hearings and has seen the pain etched on the faces of the parents of those charged. “I’ve seen Jordan’s parents be there for him, and I see the hurt in their eyes—the same hurt I used to see in my own eyes with Mike, and it breaks my heart.”

As the cases wind through court, she says, she has searched her heart for forgiveness. “Don’t get me wrong, I went through a period when I hated them. But that’s not going to bring my son back. I see them as lost souls. God took my son. I don’t know why. I believe there’s a bigger picture that will reveal itself. But they’re still here. They’re still struggling. My wish for them is that they turn their lives around.”

Still, she says, her compassion does not quite extend to forgiveness. “I’m this close,” she says, bringing a thumb and finger together. “When I do forgive them, it will be for me, not them.” In the meantime, she has found another way to help her cope, at a place that is at once both unlikely and absolutely apt: helping grieving families at the funeral home that handled her son’s arrangements.

On this day, she waits while Calee says goodbye to the brother she will never know, in the way she always does—by blowing kisses. Meanwhile, Reinart says her own goodbye as she looks at the grave, so far from the Chicago alley. “He’s at peace now,” she says, in the dying light of the afternoon. “He might have been left there, but he’s here now. He’s at rest.”

This article appears in the November 2009 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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