Megan Wells spent nearly every summer of her 31 years boating on the Rock River that runs through Ogle County, Illinois.
She cherished those evenings when the glassy water slid away and crickets pulsed from the green banks.
In June 2016, she and her uncle and two friends were idling in a pontoon boat in a placid expanse of the river, watching the sunset.
Suddenly, a low-slung, camouflage-tinted fishing boat sped toward them. Behind the wheel was a local pharmacy executive, Marc Mongan.
Wells’ boatmates leapt from their seats, waving their arms and yelling at Mongan to slow down.
Wells’ uncle made a last-ditch effort to veer the pontoon away. But Mongan’s boat roared up and over the pontoon. Its propeller slashed deep lines through the plastic seats as its prow struck Wells in the neck and chest, hurling her into the river, according to police reports.
Flung 30 feet into the water, her body was submerged for minutes as her friends screamed her name and cried for help.
Emergency responders and the lead crime scene investigator reported that Mongan appeared drunk — his face smelled of alcohol and he had glassy, bloodshot eyes and slurred speech. He couldn’t walk a straight line and failed a field sobriety test. Twenty-four empty beer cans littered the deck of his boat.
And yet, Eric Morrow, the Ogle County state’s attorney, couldn’t get a grand jury to indict Mongan on felony drunk-boating charges. Instead, he filed two misdemeanor charges, then signaled in court he might drop them both.
Wells’ parents took the unusual step of hiring an attorney to represent them as crime victims in court, and asked that Morrow be removed from the case. He initially fought their efforts but eventually relented and arranged for the appointment of a new lawyer from Illinois’ Special Prosecution Unit.
The unit was created to bring in prosecutors when personal and professional relationships create conflicts of interest for local authorities.
The special prosecutor, Dave Neal, quickly upgraded Mongan’s charges to seven felonies that could have put him in prison for at least 14 years.
“He came in on a white horse and gave us hope that he would bring justice for Megan,” said Wells’ father, David Swaziek.
Then the special prosecution collapsed.
Wells’ story is one of many that show how Illinois’ special prosecutors can themselves be implicated in a web of local conflicts, protecting powerful defendants while derailing justice for crime victims.
Small town connections
Mongan cuts a big figure in the small town of Oregon, Illinois, population 3,851.
His pharmacy has supplied drugs and medical equipment to nursing homes, hospices, and county jails across northern Illinois, and at one point employed 40 people. He owns five Ogle County properties, including a cottage overlooking the Rock River and a home on Mongan Drive, named for family forebears who served as civic leaders.
Before Morrow prosecuted Mongan, the two men were tied together politically and civically.
When Morrow previously served as a public defender, he had represented Mongan’s brother and nephew. Morrow was the president of a foundation that supported a hospice; Mongan’s company donated to that organization. When Morrow ran for Ogle County state’s attorney, members of Mongan’s extended family campaigned for him.
When prosecuting the Wells case, Morrow made decisions that seemed to help Mongan right from the start. Mongan failed a field sobriety test and refused to take a breath or blood alcohol test, according to police reports. In such situations, police can immediately seek a warrant forcing the suspect to comply or face additional criminal obstruction charges. But when the lead investigator asked for a warrant, Morrow refused to pursue one, according to a state Conservation Police officer.
When Morrow disputed that account, saying publicly that investigators never asked him to request a warrant, conservation police filed a series of internal memos accusing Morrow of lying.
“It was clear SA Morrow wanted to attack us and avoid the fact that he was lying,” wrote Conservation Police Capt. Laura Petreikis.
Wells’ parents, David and Robin Swaziek, were outraged at these revelations.
Wells’ death had left her three children, ages 4, 7, and 9, without a mother. Some days, Robin Swaziek’s grief was so severe she had trouble getting out of bed.
Seeing Wells’ lacerated body at a county morgue the night of her death, Robin had asked for the slender necklace still clasped to her daughter’s broken neck.
In April 2017, Wells’ parents filed a formal petition asking that Morrow be removed from the case because of his ties to Mongan.
Morrow and the judge rejected their plea. But Wells’ family and supporters protested, lining the courthouse steps wearing red T-shirts bearing her picture.
Three months later, in August 2017, Morrow did an about-face and told the judge he wanted Illinois’ Special Prosecution Unit to take over the case.
Morrow didn’t say it publicly or in court, but he had a professional connection to special prosecutor Neal, the new lawyer coming in.
In December 2015, Neal had arranged to deploy Morrow as a special prosecutor in neighboring Lee County, Injustice Watch found. That assignment came without additional government pay.
‘A strong possibility’ of no prison time
In many ways, Neal exemplifies the attorneys of the Special Prosecution Unit, where he has worked since 2012.
A son of Coal City, Illinois, he previously served as the state’s attorney of Grundy County. When he was first elected in 1988 he was the youngest county prosecutor in the state, he told a newspaper years later. He personally handled the prosecution of Edward Moore Jr., whose gruesome 1991 killing of Judy Zeman made national headlines.
Neal was also a political operator. While serving as state’s attorney, he was also a state central committeeman — a powerful political job overseeing Democratic Party activities in a sprawling central Illinois district.
He had his own aspirations for higher office, too. Before joining the Special Prosecution Unit, Neal ran unsuccessfully for Congress, state representative, and even his old job as state’s attorney. He reportedly considered a bid for lieutenant governor.
After initially giving the Wells family hope that Mongan might face prison time for the fatal boat crash, Neal soon began to tamp down expectations.
Between December 2017 and April 2018, trial Judge John C. Redington held at least four off-the-record conferences in chambers with Neal and Mongan’s lawyer, David Tess.
After one of those private meetings, Neal told Wells’ family that Judge Redington simply wasn’t going to send Mongan to jail.
“Redington must have told him,” David Swaziek recalled. In his view, Neal was saying Redington decided the outcome of the case before trial. Redington, Neal, and Tess all declined to comment.
Neal also sent the Swazieks a personal email in February 2018 saying, “There remains a strong possibility that [Mongan] will not be sentenced” to prison time. “It is extremely likely that any actual sentence may fall far short of your stated hope.”
The Swazieks didn’t know the details at the time, but there was another questionable relationship at play here.
Redington had close ties to Tess. The two had been partners in a law practice for at least a decade until Redington was appointed judge in September 2012.
Under Illinois Supreme Court rules, judges must disqualify themselves if a former law partner represents a party and the case at hand arose within three years of the judge leaving the firm.
Redington’s handling of the case was just outside that three-year limit, court records indicate.
A plea deal without warning
As the in-chambers discussions continued, Neal abandoned six of the felony counts he had previously filed against Mongan. Instead, he offered Mongan a plea to a single charge that did not include allegations of alcohol consumption. Mongan avoided incarceration, kept his pharmacist’s license, and continued as a government contractor.
Neal had assured Wells’ parents they would be consulted before he offered Mongan any plea deal, according to the parents and their attorney, Cindi Koroll.
Seeing the plea offer for the first time just moments before Neal filed it in court, Koroll and the family felt blindsided.
“Tears. Anger,” Robin Swaziek said, recalling her reaction. “It felt like we got kicked in the gut.”
“[We] just saw the plea that was offered,” Koroll told the judge. “We object vehemently to it.”
The tactic of overcharging a case — when prosecutors file allegations they know they cannot prove in court, then back down to minor charges — can be considered an ethical breach because it can undermine the defendant’s right to a fair trial. The American Bar Association admonishes prosecutors to never file charges greater than what can be supported by evidence.
Neal has never spoken publicly about his decision to charge seven felonies and then offer Mongan a plea deal. Leaders of the Illinois State’s Attorneys Appellate Prosecutor, the Special Prosecution Unit’s parent agency, declined to comment on the case.
When accepting his plea deal, Mongan expressed remorse over Wells’ death.
“I’ve cried alone as I live my own personal battle and punish myself daily,” he said in court. “Ultimately there are three children that will grow up without a mother. That is the one thing that I deal with every day and the most horrific thing I’ve ever been part of.”
But in a subsequent deposition for a lawsuit that followed the fatal crash, Mongan did not admit to being intoxicated the night of Wells’ death, or even to being a convicted felon. Instead, he said the Wells family pontoon caused “the accident” by trying to veer out of his boat’s path.
For the Swazieks, the special prosecutor’s plea deal only cut deeper into the unbearable wound of losing their daughter.
“You may as well have took me that night also,” Robin Swaziek told Wells in court before he was sentenced.
“We’ve lived every hour, every day, trying to cope and have some kind of life while you have never even seen the inside of a jail cell. You bonded out that night for $200 and went home. We left the hospital and morgue without our precious daughter. Justice? I think not.”
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