Could cops have arrested suicidal man before it turned deadly?

Katie Moriarty and her 6-year-old daughter Audrey were shopping in Crestwood for countertops midday on a Wednesday last year when the girl’s tablet rang.

Her father, Jim Moriarty, had initiated a video chat over the iPad. She picked up.

Jim Moriarty, 38, “looked terrible” and didn’t seem in his right mind, says Katie Moriarty, his ex-wife.

“Take care of your mom,” he told little Audrey. “I love you so much. I’ll always be with you.”

“I grabbed it and said, ‘Jim what are you doing?’ ‘Katie, I’m going to do it.’ And he showed me the gun,” Katie Moriarty says.

She hung up because she was near the store clerk and called him back from the parking lot.

“I was like, ‘What? No! What are you going to do with that?’” she says and that he answered, “I’m going to have the cops shoot me.”

Within hours that day — May 24, 2023 — he was dead after being shot by Kane County sheriff’s police after a carjacking and chase that ended in a crash at a busy intersection on the border of Batavia and Geneva.

A year later, authorities say they haven’t wrapped up their investigation and won't discuss details of the shooting beyond what was said in a news release shortly after it happened.

But the Chicago Sun-Times pieced together some of what transpired in the hours and weeks before Jim Moriarty’s death. He was a troubled man spiraling mentally after relapsing into heavy drug use which ended a year and a half of hope — sobriety, a steady job and a relationship with a live-in girlfriend.

Three weeks before his death, Jim Moriarty overdosed in an apparent suicide attempt in Cicero and was treated at Mount Sinai Hospital on the West Side, according to documents and interviews.

In the days before the shooting, he repeatedly spoke of getting police to kill him — “suicide by cop,” according to interviews with friends and family and records.

“The events that happened at the end, that wasn’t” who he was, says Cristina Escobedo, Jim Moriarty’s ex-girlfriend. “He was a good person and a good man. He had mental health issues. We were trying to get him help.”

Jim Moriarty’s sister Stephanie Moriarty says she doesn't excuse her brother’s behavior — which included harrowing instances of fleeing police during the days before his shooting death — but thinks the Kane County sheriff’s office blew an opportunity a day earlier to arrest her brother without a violent and public confrontation.

According to Aurora police records, Kane County deputies "compromised" an undercover operation on May 23, 2023, outside Jim Moriarty’s far west suburban apartment, where Aurora cops were waiting by his parked car, hoping to surprise him so they could arrest him without incident.

Missed chance for a safe arrest

But Kane County Sheriff Ron Hain ordered his officers to seize the car. They did that with marked squad cars against the wishes of the Aurora police, who left, figuring their surveillance had been blown, records show.

“If you don’t do that, none of the other issues would have escalated,” Stephanie Moriarty says, a sentiment echoed by the carjacking victim.

Hain calls that “ridiculous.” He says he hadn’t realized the extent of the Aurora operation — he blames an underling for not relaying the details — but stands by his actions to “take that weapon away,” meaning Jim Moriarty's vehicle.

Hain calls Aurora police “reactive” by just “sitting on it” and his department “proactive.”

"That type of police work is baiting someone to get into a pursuit," Hain says. "I would say they escalated things. . . . Get a warrant, and go in to the apartment. . . . grab the guy."

Aurora police won’t comment.

Hain’s deputies who shot Jim Moriarty are back on duty. Hain calls them “heroes.”

“When we can release the video and body-cam, we will do that,” he says.

The initial account from the sheriff’s office described an “exchange of gunfire," though it's unclear whether Jim Moriarty had a real gun and, if he did, whether he fired it.

The carjacking victim, Sara Edmondson, says she saw some sort of handgun. Katie Moriarty says the gun she saw during her video chat looked like a BB gun.

The sheriff's office said after the shooting that Jim Moriarty had “displayed a weapon toward deputies.”

Investigators haven't interviewed Katie Moriarty or Jim Moriarty’s sister and former girlfriend in the past year. All had spoken with him in the hours and days before his death and say they can offer insights into what happened.

“I know everything up until the moment he stole the car,” Stephanie Moriarty says, “because I was on the phone with him.”

She and Escobedo say they agreed to speak with a reporter in an effort to spotlight mental health and addiction problems and perhaps motivate others to get help.

They say they wanted to show who Jim Moriarty was and not let him be defined by his worst moments.

They say they’re frustrated the investigation has taken so long and that they’ve been told little.

“They won’t tell us anything,” Stephanie Moriarty says, though the family was given autopsy and toxicology records from the Kane County coroner’s office soon after Jim Moriarty’s death.

Eight shots hit back, backside

Those records, provided to the Sun-Times by the family after the coroner declined to release them, show Jim Moriarty had cocaine in his system. They also show he had 17 gunshot or graze wounds — including eight shots that struck him in the back or on his backside.

Also noted in the autopsy report are abrasions and “puncture wounds," though it's unclear whether those resulted from a police dog named Hudson that was unleashed at Moriarty and was killed in the gunfire. Kane County State’s Attorney Jamie Mosser says the 4-year-old Dutch shepherd was accidentally shot by officers.

The Moriarty shooting investigation was handled by the Kane County Major Crimes Task Force, which includes investigators from police departments in Chicago's outer-ring suburbs.

The case has been turned over to Mosser’s office, which will decide whether to file criminal charges as a result of the shooting. Mosser says she expects to make an announcement soon. She says the investigation took so long in part because the lead detectives had to juggle the case with other duties.

‘Pills’ a likely gateway

Jim Moriarty was born in Hinsdale and raised in Alsip. He went to Shepard High School in Palos Heights, where he played football.

In 2003, just before he graduated, he asked his future wife to prom.

“He was an amazing guy. He worked super-hard,” Katie Moriarty says, including operating equipment at a rail yard. “Super-funny, super-kind. He was kind of crazy. He’d do flips on his bicycle and stuff.

“He could fix everything. He loved working on his Mustang with his dad.”

She says he appears to have started experimenting with pills — a familiar path amid the opioid crisis that saw prescription abuse quickly turn to addiction and street drugs.

“I think pills got so expensive, so they go to other things," Katie Moriarty says. "It was after high school. It had to be a couple years in.”

The couple married in 2014. Their daughter was born in 2016.

“He was probably using before I even got married, and he was hiding it,” Katie Moriarty says.

He got hooked on heroin, and his sister says she learned about his drug problems only after their half-brother overdosed and died in 2017.

Katie Moriarty says: “People would say, ‘Why don’t you leave him?’ But it was hard because I loved him so much.

“He went to rehab a lot,” she says, but he’d relapse. “Places wouldn’t take him because they were full, or we didn’t have a lot of money.”

She says he wanted to get clean: “Unless you know someone with an addiction, you have no idea how hard it is. Heroin is just the worst thing in the entire world.”

With it came arrests and jail.

When Jim Moriarty was with his daughter, though, “He was a good dad,” and “she loved him so much,” Katie Moriarty says.

But the couple ended up getting divorced.

‘You need to get help’

Jim Moriarty landed at a suburban hospital in 2021 to clean up, then moved to a rehabilitation center in Aurora and then a sober-living facility.

Escobedo says she met him in late 2021 at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and thought he was handsome — resembling actor Jason Statham — and funny.

They moved in together in early 2023, living in an Aurora apartment complex.

Escobedo says he treated her well, not even letting her pump her own gas. She says he'd hold doors for her and send her flowers for no particular reason.

She says they started going to church, and he’d sometimes quiz her after a reading or sermon.

He worked as a forklift operator.

“We were excited, both happy, both happy together,” Escobedo says.

But Jim Moriarty started drinking, she says and spending time with people she didn’t know. She says she didn’t know where he was some nights, that he started using drugs again, though probably not heroin, based on his energy level.

They’d argue, and she pressed him to get help: “I’d give him an ultimatum — ‘You need to get help. You need to take care of yourself first, then your daughter, then me.’

“He’d try. He’d go a week being good. Then, he’d be out late at night again.

“I never stopped loving him," Escobedo says. "But I had to create a very hard boundary. I told him I was moving out. I said, ‘I wanna see you get better.' "

‘Off the deep end’

Things deteriorated, though, she says, and Moriarty “felt like he was losing me.” 

She says he started following her, that he showed up at her job and when she was shopping. As she was moving out of their apartment, she says, he threw her things off the balcony and, another time, grabbed her cell phone from her and took off.

She got a restraining order. But he still wouldn’t leave her alone and was arrested on April 29, 2023.

The next day, he left a suicide note, drove to Cicero and took a large amount of drugs. He ended up in a hospital, but it wouldn’t keep him.

“He was going off the deep end,” his sister says.

He kept contacting Escobedo, and the police kept trying to arrest him, but he’d speed away.

By the time of the shooting, he had “active warrants for robbery and aggravated fleeing and eluding,” records show.

On May 23, 2023, the day before his death, Moriarty fled from police and returned to his Aurora apartment. He tried to hide his car in a garage in an adjacent rental complex and went into his apartment.

Aurora police officers soon found the car and waited that night and into the early morning of May 24, 2023, for him to come out so they could arrest him.

The Aurora officers “put together an arrest team utilizing a block vehicle and a tire deflation device to prevent the vehicle from fleeing in a reckless manner," records say. "Considering Moriarty’s threat of not going to jail due to his suicide by cop comments and his implication of possessing a firearm, the arrest team was prepped with a shield, less lethal options and a distraction device."

But Kane County deputies “compromised” the surveillance by seizing the car, Aurora police records say.

A sheriff’s supervisor “advised that he was removing the vehicle by ‘Order of the Sheriff,’ ” the records say.

Another sheriff’s supervisor later called an Aurora official and “apologized for towing the car and stated that he felt terrible about the situation.”

Hain says he apologized, too, though he defends his decision.

Later that morning, when Moriarty called his daughter, he apparently was still in the apartment and thought the police were outside.

But they apparently had departed earlier because of “the overt presence” of Kane County squad cars, records show.

He called his sister after discovering his car was gone.

They talked again later when he said he was in an Uber — and soon ended up at a Jiffy Lube, where he carjacked Edmondson, taking her Honda.

Edmondson — who lives in the same complex as Jim Moriarty, though they didn't know each other — was "toweling off" her vehicle after a car wash when he approached and began chatting about the car, including its new rims.

Then, she says he told her, "I'm sorry, I have to do this," and got in to the Honda, with the engine already running.

She says she got in the passenger seat and pleaded, "Please don't do this."

But she says that, with a gun in his waistband, he told her, "I don't want to, but I will hurt you if you don't get out."

When he put the car in reverse, she got out, and he sped off.

Kane County deputies spotted him shortly after, and he wouldn’t pull over, they said in a news release after the shooting, with the pursuit ending “with the offending vehicle being stopped by Kane County sheriff’s deputies at Randall and Fabyan Parkway.”

The airbags deployed as he crashed. He got out, and sheriff's deputies released their dog and opened fire after he “displayed a weapon toward deputies."