Officer Flores' Costly Ouster At Crest Hill: Here's How It Went

JOLIET, IL — In late December, a press release indicated that Crest Hill Police Officer Felipe "Phil" Flores would soon be returning to work because the Channahon Police Department had cleared him of wrongdoing following the suspicious death of his estranged girlfriend, Samantha Harer, 10 months earlier.

The press release aimed to convince the public that Harer's death was a self-inflicted gunshot wound and not the case of an local off-duty police officer killing his girlfriend and staging her death to appear as a suicide, as Harer's parents have claimed in a lawsuit.

Even the Office of Will County State's Attorney Office Jim Glasgow agreed to support Channahon's treatment of Harer's death as a suicide and close down the case.

Then, January came and went. Officer Flores did not return to work. February came and went. Flores still wasn't back to work. Then, halfway into March, a memo came from the higher ups at the Crest Hill Police Department to Flores, who, by this stage, had been on paid suspension for 13 consecutive months.

Despite being publicly cleared in the Harer case, privately, the Crest Hill Police Department was building a thorough and detailed case to bring his cop career to an end with Crest Hill, Joliet Patch has learned, as a result of additional Freedom of Information Act requests.

This week, Joliet Patch confirmed that on March 14, Flores received a formal letter advising him that he was being brought up on 11 separate alleged violations of Crest Hill Police Department policy and state laws.

Flores was given notice that the hearing would take place in six days, the letter shows.

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Secondly, Flores received notice he would be the subject of an interrogation by Chief of Police Ed Clark and Deputy Chief of Police Brad Hertzmann as well as an attorney named John Kelly.

The closed door hearing was set for 1 p.m. on March 20.

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As Patch has previously reported, prior to Harer's violent death in Channahon while Flores was present in her apartment, Flores had worked as an overnight patrolman on the 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift since his hiring in 2012.

However, two years before his girlfriend died, Flores was the subject of a year-long criminal investigation alleging that the off-duty Crest Hill officer had sexually assaulted a sleeping woman at her house in Crest Hill following a night of heavy drinking at a Joliet bar.

Around December 2016, the Will County State's Attorney's Office informed the Illinois State Police that Flores was not being prosecuted for criminal sexual assault at that time; however, Crest Hill Police gave him a one-month unpaid suspension for the February 2016 incident.

The administrative meeting set for March 20 never happened, Patch confirmed Wednesday with Crest Hill Police officials. Instead, Crest Hill received a three-line, typed letter from Flores two days later, on March 22. After seven years on the force, Flores tendered his resignation effective that very same day, the letter obtained by Joliet Patch shows.

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By resigning, Flores still remains in good standing with the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board. Theoretically, he should still be eligible to pursue a police officer's job somewhere else in Illinois, including but not limited to other local agencies such as the Joliet Police Department, Will County Sheriff's Department and Bolingbrook's Police Department, among other communities.

Separately, Joliet Patch submitted a Freedom of Information Act request asking Crest Hill to provide the total amount of compensation that Flores was paid between Feb. 13, 2018, the day he was put on indefinite paid suspension hours after Samantha Harer's death, until March 22, 2019, the date he tendered his immediate resignation.

Crest Hill officials furnished the payroll information to Joliet Patch on Wednesday afternoon.

The total amount that Crest Hill spent to keep Flores off the police force for nearly all of 2018 and for nearly three full months into 2019 was $95,606.

To recap an earlier story, a federal judge in Chicago has allowed Kevin and Heather Harer, the parents of Samantha Harer, to revive their federal lawsuit against Phil Flores, as well as Channahon and Crest Hill.

The lawsuit accuses Flores of fatally shooting the WESCOM dispatcher and Channahon Police officials of orchestrating a cover up.