CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) -- Illinois State Police continue to try to find the shooter who killed a 67-year-old Orland Park woman as she was on the Dan Ryan Expressway returning home from a White Sox game. And state police hope a new tool will make it easier to solve those crimes in the future.
While no one is yet charged in the murder of Denise Huguelet, whose funeral was Monday in Orland Park, state police said cameras that read license plates are being installed on the expressway system.
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Starting this week, Illinois State Police, in cooperation with the Illinois Department of Transportation and the Chicago Department of Transportation will begin installing license plate reading cameras on Chicago area expressways.
Earlier this year, Illinois State Police received a $12.5 million grant for the purchase of specialized cameras to read the license plate numbers of vehicles moving in traffic. The installations will also include a communication system to backhaul the video images to a central location where additional software is used to query and match license plates to existing license plate and vehicle databases.
“This investment in expressway cameras further strengthens the Illinois State Police’s ability to hold violent offenders accountable and fulfill our mission to help all Illinois residents live safely,” said Governor JB Pritzker, in a statement. “Our roadways should be connections between communities, not crime scenes, and the ISP will offer the additional support necessary to local law enforcement in Chicago to protect traveling residents.”
The idea is to be able to more easily catch the people causing mayhem on expressways. The Tamara Clayton Expressway Camera Act (Expressway Camera Act), the law that allows the camera installation, went into effect more than a year and a half ago. It is named after Tamara Clayton, a woman who was on her way to work in 2019 when she was shot and killed on I-57 near Cicero Avenue. Her killer has still not been found.
In 2019, the year Clayton was killed, there had been 52 expressway shootings. In 2020, that number more than doubled with 128 expressway shootings, including an attack that wounded a 10-month-old child.
Eight months through 2021, there are already three times as many as 2019. As of last week, there were 157 reported shootings on Chicago area expressways in 2021.
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Illinois State Police will continue to work with IDOT and CDOT to assist with the installation of more than 200 license plate reader cameras over the next year. The images from these cameras will not be used for petty offenses, such as speeding.
"Increasingly, we’ve seen shootings throughout the Chicagoland expressways, and I am glad that we will now have the access to technology that will aid in the investigation of expressway shootings,” said State Senator Napoleon Harris, III (D-Harvey), in a statement. “With these innovations, I hope many crimes are solved and brought to justice, so that the victims’ families may know peace.”
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