GUEST COLUMN: Feb. 28 is a memorable date

As a newspaper reporter (even a semi-retired one), certain events, people and dates get stuck in your head.

Feb. 28 is a date that connects three sad stories that will never leave me.

One is a mystery, another concerns an alleged murder and the last, details a fatal tornado. These are events — all tragedies — which will forever be part of my mind, heart and soul.

Where is Dillon Scott?

On Feb. 28, 2016, a 20-year-old Dillon Scott vanished after reportedly fleeing the scene of a minor traffic crash in the middle of the night on a dark, rural road in Bureau County.

But, on the third anniversary of his disappearance, the final chapter of Scott’s story remains to be written.

Is the young man dead or alive? Did he stumble down a ravine in dark woods close to where he crashed his Cadillac against a guardrail? Did he run away from his wife, his family, the police to avoid prosecution? Or was he — as his mother now believes — murdered?

Over the years, I have spoken to many involved in this mystery.

I know the Bureau County police firmly believe Scott is on the lam, possibly out-of-state, to avoid arrest.

That considered, I cannot help but believe a mother who swears her son would never leave her tortured in misery and confusion.

“If Dillon was alive — if he was able — he would have called me by now,” Becky Tunget says to anyone who might ask her these days. “One way or another, I need this to be over.”

I agree with Mrs. Tunget. I, too, want closure to the Dillon Scott story.

As a reporter, the not-knowing is frustrating. As a parent, the story of a mother’s missing child continues to haunt me.

The family continues looking for answers that may never come.

Fireman arrested
for wife's murder

On Feb 28, 2017, I sat in the La Salle County State’s Attorney Offices and heard that Ottawa fireman Kenneth Cusick was charged with murdering his wife, Tracy Cusick, inside their Ottawa home. The mother of two was found “face down” drowned in a toilet in her Ottawa home Jan. 17, 2006.

Within minutes after a La Salle County Grand Jury returned an indictment against Cusick for the alleged murder, Ottawa police had the suspect in custody.

In her meeting room, State’s Attorney Karen Donnelly conducted a brief news conference with members of her staff and Ottawa Police Capt. David Gualandri, who had pushed the case forward for many years.

“This is doing justice that has been needed (for a long time),” said Donnelly, who made the murder case a campaign issue last fall as she ran for state’s attorney, promising to bring it before a grand jury. “After reviewing the file in great detail once I assumed office, I felt there was enough evidence to move forward. My entire team and myself have been working tirelessly to get the case to where we are now to get the three counts of murder against Mr. Cusick.”

Since that time, more than two years later after that arrest and 13 years after the death, a trial has yet to be held in the case.

Ottawa tornado kills 2

On Feb. 28, 2017, as I left the Cusick arrest news conference, I was stunned to see dark clouds rolling over Ottawa from the west.

With no sense of safety or common sense, I drove directly into the storm that went on to damage sections of Naplate and South Ottawa.

I remembered standing in the wind and rain outside the State Street home where 76 year-old Wayne Tuntland and David (D.J.) A. Johnson, 31, were killed under a fallen tree. In total, 14 patients were seen at OSF St. Elizabeth Medical Center in Ottawa as a result of the storm.

Windy Davis did not know Toby Johnson, her neighbor from across the alley on Ottawa’s South Side.

She believes it was God’s will that led her to him through the rain and the wind.

Davis, a registered nurse, attempted CPR on Johnson’s husband, D.J., during the height of the storm within the broken branches of a fallen tree, which already had taken the life of Johnson’s father.

Despite the efforts by Davis that night, D.J. died days later in a Peoria Hospital.

Interviewed days after the storm, Davis said that night is forever etched in her mind ... as it is in mine.

Today, two years later, lives from the horrific storm are still being repaired.

I moved to La Salle County in July 1974 with personal plans only to stay a year or two.

However, the people, the history, the parks, the communities (and Rip’s Chicken) gave me so much love and support that there was no way I could ever leave the Illinois Valley.

One day, my story will end.

When it does, I hope to be remembered as a photographer and writer who cared for his neighbors and appreciated life here in Starved Rock Country.

However, whatever happens in the future, I know the date of Feb. 28 will always pull me back to these three stories.

STEVE STOUT is a retired news reporter for The Times. Because a journalist never truly retires, he still contributes articles and photos.