John Balcerzak - Dahmer Incident

Dahmer Incident

Two women, Sandra Smith and Nicole Childress, discovered the victim, 14-year-old Konerak Sinthasomphone, after he had managed to escape from Dahmer's apartment, naked, bleeding from the rectum and heavily under the influence of drugs. They called 911, Balcerzak and his partner Joseph Gabrish were dispatched. Though the Laotian immigrant had been in the country for ten years and spoke English fluently, in his drugged and brain-injured state, Konerak was unable to communicate his situation to authorities. Dahmer found the boy with the police and convinced them that the boy was his 19-year-old lover. Smith and Childress recognized the boy from the neighborhood and were convinced that Sinthasomphone's life was in peril. They communicated this to the officers and tried to save the boy. However, Balcerzak and his partner returned Konerak to Dahmer's apartment, against Konerak's and the women's protests. The officers noticed a strange smell in Dahmer's apartment, which was the decaying corpse of a previous victim in the bedroom, but made no attempt to investigate. Later that evening Dahmer sexually abused, killed, and dismembered the boy.

Balcerzak and Gabrish were terminated from the Milwaukee Police Department after their actions were widely publicized, including an audiotape of the officers making homophobic statements to their dispatcher and cracking jokes about having reunited the "lovers". The officers had never checked the boy's ID or verified his identity. The officers did not check Dahmer's identification; had they done so, they would have discovered that Dahmer was a sex offender previously convicted for molesting Sinthasomphone's older brother.

Both officers later appealed their termination, won, and were reinstated.