Konerak Sinthasomphone was 14 years old, and he’d lived in Milwaukee for most of his life. His family had fled a rice farm in communist Laos in 1979 and settled in Milwaukee with help from the Catholic archdiocese. He was the youngest of several siblings. Some of his older brothers had found work as welders and machinists to help support the family. They’d built something in America. What none of them knew on the afternoon of May 26, 1991, was that Jeffrey Dahmer had already come for their family once.
In September 1988, Dahmer had approached Konerak’s older brother Somsack near their neighborhood and lured him to his apartment. Somsack was 13. He managed to escape. Dahmer was arrested, charged with second-degree sexual assault, and served 1 year in prison. He was released in early 1990 and put on 5 years’ probation. He was still on that probation the afternoon he spotted Konerak on Wisconsin Avenue. He didn’t know who Konerak was. He offered him money to come back to his apartment for photographs. Konerak went. He lost consciousness inside. Dahmer left to buy beer. When he came back outside, Konerak had woken up and stumbled into the street.
He was naked. He was bleeding. He couldn’t stand on his own. Glenda Cleveland’s daughter, Sandra Smith, and her niece, Nicole Childress, found him in the alley near their building. Both of them were teenagers. They called 911. Officers John Balcerzak and Joseph Gabrish showed up. Dahmer got there right after them. He told the officers Konerak was 19 and his boyfriend. He said they’d had a fight and Konerak had too much to drink. The officers didn’t ask for ID. They took Dahmer’s word for it.
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Sandra and Nicole told them the boy was a child. The officers threatened to arrest them if they didn’t back off. Then they walked Konerak back up to Dahmer’s apartment and left him there. Down the hall in the bedroom, the body of another victim was on the floor. On the radio back to their dispatcher, one of the officers was laughing. The intoxicated Asian male had been returned to his sober boyfriend. His partner said he’d need to get deloused at the station. If they’d run Dahmer’s name that night, they’d have seen an active probation case for molesting the boy’s own brother.
What Glenda Cleveland Did Next
Glenda Cleveland had been on the phone with the 911 dispatcher the whole time. After the police left, she kept calling. She got through to an officer connected to the call and asked him directly whether the boy was a minor in danger. He told her it was a domestic dispute between adult men. Days later, she saw a photo of a missing 14-year-old in the newspaper and recognized him as the boy from the street. She called the police again. Nobody called her back. She called the FBI. Nobody followed up.
Thirty minutes after Balcerzak and Gabrish left the apartment, Dahmer killed Konerak. He was Dahmer’s 13th victim. Five more men died before Tracy Edwards escaped Dahmer’s apartment on July 22, 1991, with a handcuff still on his wrist and flagged down a police car. When officers went inside, they found photographs. It was over.
Balcerzak and Gabrish were fired in September 1991. They appealed. In 1994, a judge ordered the city to take them both back and pay each of them $55,000 in back pay. Balcerzak came back to the force and in 2005 was elected president of the Milwaukee Police Association — the union that represents Milwaukee officers in contract talks with the city. The officer who’d handed a bleeding 14-year-old back to a serial killer was now representing Milwaukee police. He retired in 2017. Gabrish eventually became interim police chief of a department in Grafton, Wisconsin.
Glenda Cleveland stayed in her building near 25th Street until 2009, then moved a couple of blocks away. The county board formally honored her. Her mayor called her a model citizen. She died in 2011 at age 56. She told a reporter in 1991: “I don’t see any excuse for people not caring for other people.”
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