Illinois Woman in Custody in Killing of Police Officer, Wounding of 2nd

January 2nd, 2022

Awake Goy

BRADLEY, Ill.—A woman wanted in the fatal shooting of one police officer and the wounding of another at a northern Illinois hotel surrendered to police hours after a man also suspected in the shooting was arrested in Indiana, police said.

Xandria Harris, 26, of Bradley, Illinois, turned herself in Friday afternoon at the Bradley Police Department while accompanied by her attorney, Illinois State Police said. She was being held at a detention facility in Kankakee.

Harris’s attorney, Phil Haddad, declined to discuss her alleged involvement in the shooting, but said that she turned herself in voluntarily and will appear in bond court on Monday.

“She maintains her innocence. She’s a mother of three children and she’s pregnant,” Haddad told WLS-TV on Friday.

Hours before Harris surrendered, a man who is suspected in late Wednesday’s shooting that killed Sgt. Marlene Rittmanic, a 49-year-old Bradley police officer, and critically wounded her partner, officer Tyler Bailey, 27, was arrested Friday morning at a home in North Manchester, Indiana, police said.

Darius Sullivan, a 26-year-old from Kankakee, Illinois, was wanted in the officers’ shootings on active warrants for first-degree murder, attempted murder, and aggravated battery with a firearm.

State police said in a news release Friday evening that arrangements were being made to extradite Sullivan from Indiana to Kankakee County.

“In a multi-jurisdictional effort, two alleged cop killers have been taken into custody today and will now face justice,” Illinois State Police Director Brendan Kelly said in the news release.

Investigators believe Harris was at the hotel when Rittmanic and Bailey were shot.

Illinois State Police did not specify in their news release what charges she faces, but the Kankakee Daily Journal reported that she had been charged in a no-bond warrant with three counts of murder and one count of attempted murder.

Rittmanic and Bailey were at a hotel late Wednesday to investigate a report of dogs that were barking in an unattended vehicle in the parking lot, police said. The officers found the room where the vehicle’s possible owner was staying and were shot while talking to the people in that room, authorities said.

The Daily Journal reported that five other people have been arrested in connection with the shootings, including two people who allegedly impeded the search for Sullivan and Harris.

The hotel shootings came hours after a sheriff’s deputy was fatally shot while responding to a motorist assist call on a highway near Mill Shoals, roughly 200 miles (322 kilometers) south of Bradley.

The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office said Deputy Sean Riley was found dead by a second officer who later arrived at the scene, and the deputy’s squad car was later found abandoned on I-64, police said. Authorities arrested a Kentucky man suspected in that attack and a carjacking in Missouri.