Chicago Police Demand Justice for Murdered Officer Clifton Lewis

America's police departments have been thrown so completely back on their heels by an unrelenting anti-police campaign that many officers, particularly in large urban areas, have resorted to just going through the motions of the job, police insiders say. Keep your head down and avoid confrontation whenever possible, or risk getting branded a fascist thug and targeted with a civil rights lawsuit. Get your twenty years in and get out. Who can blame them.

But in Chicago some retired police officers are fighting back against the up-is-down narrative that the cops are the bad guys, and the criminals are the real victims. They have focused their fight on the still unresolved 2011 murder of a young officer, 41-year-old Clifton Lewis. The Lewis case, they hope, will catalyze exposure of the corruption behind a growing multi-million-dollar exoneration industry—in which lawyers, and their lackeys in the press, portray cops and prosecutors as incompetents and thugs in order to spring convicted murderers from jail and to bully elected officials into paying out hefty wrongful conviction settlements. The Lewis case got swept up in the shakedown, but with key differences from many of the other exonerations, differences that make his case all the more compelling: A cop everyone loved and respected. And he was murdered while working in an off-duty security job to earn extra money for his upcoming wedding. 

"The Lewis case really showcases how the criminal and civil justice systems are lined up against the cops," Martin Preib said in an interview. Preib, former Chicago FOP spokesman, author of the Substack column Crooked City, and the de facto leader of the campaign to expose the exoneration racket, told Restoration News, "It's a case that simply demands justice for a cop everyone loved, and for his fiancée who died far too young from the stress of his murder and the travesty of the legal process."

"We are fighting for him," he added, "and for every officer who risks the same fate simply by putting on the uniform every day."

(READ MORE: A New Day Dawns as Chicago's Soros Prosecutor Exits Stage Left)

A Senseless Murder

An eight-year veteran, Lewis was working security on the night of December 29, 2011 at an oft-robbed convenience store on the city's tough West Side. He was soon to be married to Tamara Latrice Tucker whom he met years before on the job. 

Two masked gunmen entered the store and shot Lewis at his station behind the counter, with one reaching over the counter and shooting him in the back as he lay dying. They got away with $700 in cash.

Police arrested three members of the Spanish Cobras street gang for the murders: Edgardo Colon, Tyrone Clay and Alexander Villa.

The overwhelming evidence included confessions by Colon and Clay, and multiple angles of surveillance video. 

Additional evidence: 

• The car observed in the alley where the shooters fled matches a car owned by Villa's girlfriend and used by Villa.
• A witness in the car with the two shooters and getaway driver before, during, and after the murder, testified in the grand jury that Villa was the first shooter, and to the identity of the second shooter and getaway driver. At trial the witness did not testify to the same [flipped] and was impeached with the prior grand jury testimony.
• On the night of the crime Villa spoke to a friend in the presence of a witness who later testified in the grand jury and at trial that Villa told the friend in their presence that he was involved in robbery and murder. Villa was gloating that he killed a "pig." 
• A week after the murder Villa attempted to erase his entire Facebook account after hearing police were near his house. 

Colon and Villa were convicted. Clay spent 12 years in jail awaiting trial—his trial delayed by lengthy appeals.

Soros Prosecutor Enters the Fray

Then the lawyers, the media and one of George Soros's prized prosecutors, former Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, went to work. In 2023 and 2024, Foxx's office dropped charges against all three, based in part on claims that cell phone records showed one of the offenders could not have been at the convenience store at the time of the murder. Except the records, prosecutors close to the case say, relied on an incorrect time zone, a difference of two hours. 

During the trial, Cook County Judge James Linn, who convicted Villa in 2019 and sentenced him to life for his role in the murders, rejected all claims of misconduct by police and prosecutors, and rejected the lawyers' claims regarding the cell phone records. The judge ruled that Villa received a fair trial, making Foxx's move inexplicable.

The heat is now on Foxx's successor, Eileen O'Neill Burke, to retry the three before they are awarded millions from the wrongful conviction suits they filed in federal court. So far, her office has given no indication that it will act.

Infuriated by Burke's seeming indifference, Preib and former Chicago FOP President Mark Donahue reached out last summer to Police Superintendent Larry Snelling to pressure her. They also reached out to US Attorney General Pam Bondi, who could bring federal civil rights charges against the three. No response as yet.

Preib and Donahue wrote a letter to Chicago P.D. Superintendent Larry Snelling, saying, "Prosecutors who investigated and tried the case, as well as those familiar with it, believe that the men could be convicted again and sentenced to prison where they belong. These public servants are hopeful that Burke will change her mind and take up the case. They believe that doing so could yield many fruits that would restore some semblance of justice in Chicago, particularly relating to cases in which police officers have been murdered. Failure to do so could unleash years of legal and media attacks against police and prosecutors merely for doing their job."

Preib has covered the Lewis case and many other questionable exonerations in his Crooked City column. He has many to choose from. Over her eight years in office, Foxx exonerated over 250 convicted murderers. Most have filed wrongful conviction lawsuits. 

Widow Never Sees Earthly Justice

For more than a decade, Tamara Latrice Tucker attended nearly every hearing involving the three men charged in the murder of her fiancé, the Chicago Sun-Times reported at the time of her death from cancer in June 2023. 

Her death came just days before prosecutors dropped all charges against the alleged getaway driver and one of the men accused of shooting Lewis. Her wake took place a few hours after Foxx's office dismissed the charges.

"I'm glad she wasn't around to see it," her father Ronald Tucker Sr. told the Sun-Times as mourners left his daughter's funeral at United Baptist Church. "It's a shame."

(READ MORE: We Should Not Have to Be Ashamed of Our Cities)