Domestic violence task force in honor of slain Joliet toddler passes in Illinois

Chicago Tribune - 5/31/2021

Illinois is expected to launch a new task force aimed at identifying gaps in domestic violence laws in memory of a Joliet boy whose mother’s pleas for protection against the toddler’s abusive father were ignored.

State lawmakers approved the task force without opposition on Sunday during the waning days of the spring session.

The panel will be asked to establish protective networks for victims, propose treatment options for victims and offenders, bolster specialty courts to handle abuse cases and look at shortcomings in existing laws and procedures.

The group will have roughly two dozen members, including domestic abuse survivors, law-enforcement officials and legal experts, according to the bill. The move will allow the state to take a comprehensive look at its domestic violence laws, which have been written in a piecemeal fashion for decades, said Republican Rep. David Welter of Morris, the measure’s chief sponsor.

“It’s going to start the process of putting everything all under one umbrella,” Welter said. “And we’re going to do it by bringing people to the table who’ve never had a seat before.”

Known as Colton’s Task Force, the legislation honors 18-month-old Colton Miller, who was killed in September 2019 after his father repeatedly shot him at close range in his Joliet home. The father, Christopher Miller, then put a pistol to his own head and pulled the trigger.

Colton’s mother, Cassandra Tanner Miller, had pushed for the legislation in the weeks following her son’s death as a way for the public to remember Colton, a towheaded toddler who loved monster trucks, Batman and his big sister.

“It’s a beautiful tragedy,” Tanner Miller said after the bill’s passage. “There’s a beauty in what we did and what this legislation represents. I created a legacy for Colton. I did what any mother would do and made sure her child’s life had meaning.”

Miller had separated from her estranged husband a roughly a year before the shooting so her children could grow up in a home free from domestic violence and drug use.

Christopher Miller was facing felony charges in both Cook and DuPage counties at the time of the shooting, and records show he ignored state law that required him to relinquish his firearms. Cassandra Tanner Miller warned DuPage prosecutors about the weapons, but no one acted on the information. DuPage authorities told her to seek an order of protection if she was afraid.

A month later, Miller, who had cocaine and alcohol in his system, barged into the family’s home, punched Tanner Miller repeatedly in the face, hit her with a candleholder and then choked her until she lost consciousness. He also attacked his 9-year-old stepdaughter, biting and pinning her down until she managed to break his hold and pull her mother outside the house to safety.

Tanner Miller and her daughter, Camryn, made it as far as the next-door neighbor’s garage when they heard gunshots coming from the second story of her home. Miller fired the illicit gun so many times, at least 10, that the coroner could not definitively track the bullets that shattered the toddler’s skull.

Tanner Miller, who will be among the domestic abuse survivors on the task force, takes solace in knowing something positive has come out of her family’s anguish.

“My hope is that now domestic violence will be taken seriously and viewed as a life-or-death situation,” she said. “This work will save lives and, when it does, it will be because of little boy named Colton.”

sstclair@chicagotribune.com