A wrongful death lawsuit has been filed against a Lisle man charged with reckless homicide in the boat crash that killed a Des Plaines woman and injured her fiancée last month on the Fox River.
Attorney Louis Cairo said Richard Stevenson was a menace, who had a history of reckless driving on the Chain-O’-Lakes.
“We’re talking about a very wealthy family that has an incredibly successful, wealthy corporation that enables their spoiled son to go out and buy a half-million-dollar boat for cash, party on his boat, be a menace to the community, driving his boat 70, 80-miles per hour, scaring the heck out of people,” Cairo said during a press conference in his office.
Stevenson is alleged to have had a blood-alcohol content nearly three times the legal threshold of .08 when he drove his speeding 3-engine boat over a smaller boat, killing Magdalena Jablonska and injuring her fiancée, Alen Telmini.
Jablonska, who went by Maggie, was decapitated.
“I heard loud engines and I looked to the left at Maggie and then she was gone,” Telmini said. “I relieve that moment every day, a few times.”Jablonska’s sister, Michelle Macias, said she was the kind of person who helped everyone.
She said when she got a call after the crash from her sister’s phone, a sheriff’s deputy was on the other end and told her to meet him at the hospital.
She’s a medical professional and said she asked about her sister at the front desk.
When she was told that her sister’s name was not in the system, she knew she was dead. She then heard if from the deputy.
The filing of the lawsuit is the start of a long process that won’t conclude until after the criminal case.
Cairo said any bars that served Stevenson alcohol could be defendants, as well.
Stevenson was fired from his job at Stevenson Crane, owned by his mother, two days after the crash.
He remains in jail.
