In the wake of rooftop standoff on West Side, more questions than answers remain

John Litsiardakis died last weekend just a mile from where he grew up in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, according to his brother.

His death — ruled a suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot wound — came about 16 hours after the 67-year-old, armed with at least one gun, took to the roof of a building he previously owned on West Chicago Avenue.

A Chicago Police Department SWAT team was called to 4140 W. Chicago Ave. around 9:30 a.m. on June 2. Litsiardakis had other weapons, too, but how many and where he got them remains unclear, according to police officials.

With a decades-old felony drug conviction, Litsiardakis couldn’t legally own or possess a firearm.

Litsiardakis was a fixture in the area. He bought the building in the mid-1980s and used it to house his auto repair business, his brother said. However, court records show, the building was put up for sale 19 years ago because of Litsiardakis not paying taxes.

Using a drone camera, a Tribune journalist captured photos that showed debris — tables, chairs, patio tents — strewn across the roof of 4140 W. Chicago. Also visible were five flags, including an American flag hung upside down, as well as a yellow poster board, roughly 3-feet by 3-feet in size, emblazoned with a red swastika.

Litsiardakis’ erratic behavior was a top-of-mind concern for neighbors. He also was active on social media in the weeks before his death. A Twitter account bearing his name made several posts threatening President Joe Biden and the “Chicago administration.” On May 12, Litsiardakis posted a video to Twitter that he apparently recorded while on the roof, showing the red swastika sign.

A day before the SWAT team was called to the building, community leaders in West Humboldt Park held a news conference to voice their concerns. Though the swastika sign had gone up and down after police responded to the building several weeks ago, the man also loudly broadcast hateful diatribes, as well as a variety of music, from on top of the roof throughout the day and night.

“This is not safe,” Farrah Walker, secretary of the West Humboldt Park Community Coalition, said before the final incident. “People are outraged. People are shocked. People are scared.”

Born “John Lichard” in February 1956, he legally changed his last name to Litsiardakis two years ago, according to Cook County court records. “Litsiardakis” was his grandfather’s surname when he immigrated to Chicago from Greece in the early 1900s, according to Glen Lichard, Litsiardakis’ younger brother.

Lichard said he and his brother grew up on North Christiana Avenue in Humboldt Park, the same block where their grandfather lived. He insisted that Litsiardakis did not harbor any racial animus.

“We grew up and our neighborhood was totally Black and we were like the only white people in the neighborhood or on our block for a while,” Lichard said. “Some of our best friends were Black. So, as far as him being prejudiced or something like that, no, that’s not the way we were brought up.”

The brothers lost contact after their mother died in 2009. No official entity has yet identified Litsiardakis.

“We didn’t keep in touch but we didn’t have anger toward each other or anything like that. We just didn’t keep in touch,” Lichard said. “Things just went a little south when my ma died and things just, you know … we just kind of, like, went our own way.”

Despite years of not speaking, Lichard said his brother was a kind and generous person, always willing to help however he could. After Lichard and his wife got married 35 years ago, Litsiardakis paid for their honeymoon trip to Lake Tahoe.

“His heart was so big,” Lichard said.

Court records suggest Litsiardakis faced money problems over the last two decades. He filed an appeal after the building’s tax deed was sold in 2004, but the city later placed two liens on the property, one in 2007 and the other in 2009, because of Litsiardakis’ failure to pay $2,300 in water bills.

In 2008, Litsiardakis was also ordered to pay more than $17,000 in a breach of contract lawsuit that was brought against him two years earlier.

Lichard believes that financial hardships contributed to his brother’s decline.

“I did not know he was broke and I just think he wanted it to end,” Lichard said. “He was a very proud person, he didn’t want to be a burden on anybody, as far as (asking) family members, ‘Give me a handout,’ or something. I figure he just wanted it to end. I know he wasn’t going to hurt anybody or shoot people off the roof. That…I mean, no. I can’t see that happening.”

Friday, June 2, was graduation day at Orr Academy High School, the West Side campus that sits one block southeast of the building on Chicago Avenue where Litsiardakis assumed his perch. The ceremony was set to start at 10 a.m., less than an hour after the SWAT situation began.

As the morning turned to afternoon, police closed off Chicago Avenue between Pulaski and Kostner. CTA bus service was rerouted. Traffic on Pulaski, a one-lane thoroughfare, lurched along.

It was a steady afternoon in the CPD’s Harrison District too. Rarely did more than an hour pass without a police car or ambulance weaving through traffic and speeding through the intersection, lights and siren activated. One of those ambulances was for a man who suffered a drug overdose outside Orr.

News reporters and photographers set up a few feet away, attempting to interview passersby. One man, Eric McNair, told reporters that the man on the roof was a growing concern for neighbors over the last three months.

“He’s on a loudspeaker, you know, speaking antisemitic things. He’s always playing antisemitic music. This is something they have to deal with on a daily basis,” McNair said.

“He is not engaging with anybody, I don’t think, personally but over the loudspeaker he is saying, you know, racial things, something I won’t repeat. But they are worried,” he added. “I was speaking to one of the workers in the school and they said he has weapons and grenades, and I’m like, ‘How was he able to get it? [Did he] Amazon it? How did he get it?’”

As news cameras focused on McNair, a teen boy walked up behind him making faces and hand gestures. A reporter with WLS-CH. 7 tried to shoo him away, and the boy lifted his T-shirt to reveal a green plastic toy gun tucked into the waistband of his shorts. Nearby CPD tactical officers scolded him to keep moving.

Around the corner, a group of about 20 people, mostly strangers, waited for a bus to take them south on Pulaski. The street closures translated to longer wait times for buses, and the approaching rush hour didn’t help matters. After more than 20 minutes, three buses arrived at the same time, but only two stopped to pick up passengers.

Though Chicago Avenue was closed off, several side streets near the building remained open as negotiators sought to coax out Litsiardakis. In the 800 block of North Kedvale Avenue, a well-kept block filled with bungalows and two-flats guarded by wrought iron fences, about a dozen residents used the situation as a social opportunity.

As a police helicopter circled, occasionally leaving to refuel at Midway Airport, some residents set up folding chairs on the sidewalk to watch as SWAT officers darted up and down the block with guns in hand. A man who lived on the east side of Kedvale yelled to neighbors across the street that “John” would “go out with a bang” like Al Pacino’s character in the 1983 film “Scarface.”

Another man was briefly detained after he walked past the officers and tried to speak with Litsiardakis, telling the police that the two were friends and that he could help resolve the situation peacefully.

Sixteen hours after police were called to the building, the CPD released a statement saying that SWAT officers discovered a man dead inside. The Cook County medical examiner’s office said the cause of death was a gunshot wound to the head, and the death was ruled a suicide.

The CPD held a news conference the following Monday. Larry Snelling, chief of the bureau of counterterrorism, said it wasn’t yet clear how many weapons Litsiardakis had access to. The building he was in, Snelling added, would likely need to be demolished.

“We know he had multiple weapons, but a final count we don’t have at this time,” Snelling said. “The location was very chaotic, there were a lot of things in there.”

Court records show he had a felony conviction in the mid-1980s for possession of a controlled substance, so he couldn’t legally buy a gun. Photos taken the day of the standoff show Litsiardakis aiming a rifle, and police radio dispatches suggested he pointed a gun at a police helicopter.

Snelling acknowledged that police had previously received several calls about the building, and said the mass of garbage contributed to the hourslong police response. He added that no CPD officers fired their weapons during the standoff.

“So it took a while for us to decide to go in because, if you saw the apparatus that he had built on top of the building, there was no reason for us not to believe that he had set something up inside of that building also,” Snelling added.

His brother said he didn’t learn of the standoff until the following day, hours after Litsiardakis died.

“I wish the SWAT (team) would’ve at least (contacted me). I’m easy to look up. They probably were going with the wrong last name,” Lichard said. “But I would’ve gave him a call and I would’ve tried to even talk (to) him, just try to, you know, find out what’s going on with him.”

“The world feels a little stranger now knowing he’s not there for me,” Lichard added.

Wednesday morning, demolition workers cleared debris from the roof where Litsiardakis stood during the standoff. Wood pallets had been taken down from the building, along with a red ceramic furnace. Records from the city’s Department of Buildings show that inspectors were back at the property on June 6 and ordered that it be repaired or demolished.

In the auto body shop next door, Amado Alvarez said he hadn’t had any serious issues with Litsiardakis before the neighbor killed himself. Police had stationed themselves around his shop during the standoff, he said.

He and other mechanics wondered if there was a way Litsiardakis could have been safely arrested.

“Why don’t you wait one day outside, when he comes,” Alvarez said. “Take him to jail or whatever, but the way the guys did it, that was no good.”

Farrah Walker, one of the West Humboldt Park Community Coalition activists who had shared concerns about Litsiardakis the day before the standoff, said her neighborhood group was saddened by news of his suicide.

“We never wanted this to be the outcome of what happened with John. We wanted him to get help,” she said Tuesday.

The group “rang the bell” for weeks, flagging concerns that Litsiardakis was unwell and had access to guns as he prominently displayed a swastika, Walker said. She felt the activists’ concerns weren’t taken seriously, suggesting that they would’ve been addressed more quickly in a wealthier neighborhood.

Police were aware of Litsiardakis because he was the focus of two SWAT responses in the last year, she added. Officers didn’t arrest him after a SWAT team responded to the building in May 2022, police said last week.

“He walked around the community and could have been arrested,” she said. “This is just an incident that highlights the unchecked and untreated mental health issues that are ongoing, not just in our community, but in the greater Chicago area.”