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Jennifer Scherr was the mother of an 8-year-old girl dying of brain cancer.
She says her father-in-law, a Chicago cop, helped her grow marijuana in her Evergreen Park basement to medicate her dying child’s suffering.
Officer Curtis Scherr gave her weighing scales and growing lamps, told her how not to get caught, and even helped tend what he called her “garden,” she says.
Then, in the summer of 2012, little Liza died, and everything went to hell.
Her father-in-law described Liza’s remains as a “biohazard” and wanted them removed from his daughter-in-law’s home before everyone had paid their respects, she says.
He added relatives she didn’t want included to the obituary, then brought them to the funeral, she says. He placed Catholic icons on Liza’s casket, though Liza and her mom were Protestants, she says.
And a week later, he tried to take her ashes from the funeral home and flew into a rage when he wasn’t allowed to, she says.
Then he and another cop went to a Cook County judge and got a search warrant, saying there were drugs in Jennifer Scherr’s basement.
The marijuana plants were gone by the time the DEA raided, four days after the funeral — Jennifer Scherr said she threw them out when her daughter died.
But it was just the start of a legal saga that last week ended up in the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Jennifer Scherr’s allegations — which she repeated in a recent interview with the Chicago Sun-Times — were initially made in a federal lawsuit against her 64-year-old father-in-law, alleging he violated her constitutional rights by orchestrating the raid.
Jennifer Scherr’s lawsuit was tossed out last year by U.S. District Judge Samuel Der-Yeghiayan, who said it was legally irrelevant that Curtis Scherr may have been motivated by an “unfortunate family feud.”
And last week the appeals court agreed, saying the only relevant facts were that Jennifer Scherr admitted she was illegally growing marijuana and that her father-in-law knew about it.
But in a 10-page opinion published by the 7th Circuit on Wednesday in Chicago, Judge Richard Posner also wrote that, if Jennifer Scherr’s allegations are true, the officer’s actions were “atrocious.”
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