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Ald. Ricardo Munoz allowed to return home after wife says she wants to reconcile despite alleged attack

Chicago Tribune - 2/27/2019

Feb. 27-- Feb. 27--A Cook County judge on Wednesday allowed Ald. Ricardo Munoz to return home after his wife announced she wants to reconcile with him despite the misdemeanor charge he physically attacked her on New Year's Eve.

Judge Callie Lynn Baird amended an order of protection so Munoz can have physical contact with his wife, but the longtime 22nd Ward alderman still faces the domestic battery charge.

"He's a really good man," Betty Torres Munoz said after the brief hearing at the domestic violence court in the South Loop. "(Alcohol) addiction has taken the best of him."

Before the hearing started, she handed him cards for his belated birthday and Valentine's Day.

Munoz, sporting a scruffy beard, blue jeans ripped in the knee and an untucked dress shirt under a black long-sleeved top, declined to reveal his plans to reporters but indicated he understood the judge meant he could return home "as long as I'm not intoxicated."

"I'm going back to Carol Stream to work on my sobriety," said Munoz, who indicated he's been living with his sister in the west suburb while attending alcoholism therapy for four hours a day in Elgin.

In filing for an order of protection on Jan. 2, Torres Munoz alleged her husband "forcibly" grabbed and pushed her during a heated argument two nights earlier, causing her to fall and hit her back and head, as well as twist her left arm.

"Ricardo had been drinking all day + was drunk," she wrote in the filing. She said she feared "for my well-being."

In issuing the order of protection, Judge Megan Goldish told the alderman to not only stay away from his wife but also from their home, a dog named Rambo and his wife's downtown workplace -- 118 N. Clark St. -- the same government building where Munoz works.

Munoz, who was appointed to his seat by Mayor Richard M. Daley in 1993, is the city's longest-tenured Hispanic alderman, but he announced in July that he would not seek re-election. At the time he said he was retiring because he was "having fun writing the next chapter of my life."

A native of Monterrey, Mexico, Munoz has faced other controversies over the years. He acknowledged that he intervened to help a relative get into a prestigious city high school in 2009. And in 2008, his estranged father was sentenced to four years in prison for taking part in a fake ID ring.

The alderman also previously disclosed that as a teenager he had been affiliated with a Little Village gang and had been arrested on charges of unlawful use of weapons and controlled substances. Daley hailed Munoz, who rose to become then-Ald. Jesus "Chuy" Garcia's chief of staff, as a positive role model for youths.

In 2010, six months before the City Council election, Munoz said he was an alcoholic, admitting he drank excessively after work but not in the mornings and afternoons. He was re-elected twice after that.

As part of a 2013 story on Cook County judges sealing divorce records for an array of powerful and connected people, the Tribune reported that a judge had impounded a divorce case filed by Munoz's wife in 2009.

At the time of the story, Munoz told the Tribune he had sought to seal the divorce records because "it dealt with some very embarrassing drinking issues." Munoz said then that he had reconciled with his wife.

"I'm a public figure and the court has rules, and I played by those rules," he said of the sealed divorce records. "I didn't ask for any special treatment."

rsobol@chicagotribune.com

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