Sandra Gardner can best be described as a mom on a mission.
The Oswego woman, whose sheer determination has helped her deal with cerebral palsy all her life, had no choice but to take on that role from the day her 22-year-old son Eddie went missing almost two-and-a-half years ago.
Frustrated and often angry at the way she said police handled his disappearance in March of 2022, Gardner relied on her own fortitude and family to keep the case moving forward.
She tried to get Hertz to report his rental car as stolen. She hired private detectives. She worked with a nonprofit to search a channel of the Calumet River, and with the Chicago Park District and cadaver dogs to comb Beaubien Woods.
She contacted media, including CBS-Channel 2, which ran multiple stories about the case. She and daughter Jessica Gardner pulled valuable tracking information from Eddie’s missing cellphone. She sent out daily emails to law enforcement.
And she reached out to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office over and over, until finally learning that a body brought in six weeks earlier was, tragically, her son.
Even after Eddie’s skeletal remains were discovered in March of this year in a Chicago abandoned building with multiple bullet holes in his torso, Gardner is not about to rest until those responsible are brought to justice.
She contacts Chicago police on a weekly basis. She continues to seek information from Oswego police, where the missing person’s report was filed, even firing off a letter to the Illinois Attorney General’s Office a couple weeks ago after her FOIA request for redacted information about the investigation was denied by local authorities.
“Any mother would do what I am doing. I won’t give up … I don’t care how much it costs me,” Gardner insisted. “Eddie would want me to find the people who did this.”
Her son, a 2019 graduate of Oswego High School, traveled back and forth between her home and his father’s in Bolingbrook, Gardner told me, until in November of 2021 she refused to let him in her house with his girlfriend who she insisted from the beginning was nothing but bad news.
Because Eddie was never far from his cellphone, Gardner suspected something was wrong when her calls went to voice mail. On March 14, 2022, she filed a report with Oswego police, and the following day asked Hertz to report the 2021 Dodge Charger he had been renting as stolen.
The company refused, she said, despite Gardner’s daily emails pleading for help, until the media ran stories on the case more than a month later, which she insists cost valuable time in tracking Eddie’s whereabouts.
Two weeks after his disappearance, the Charger hit four parked cars in Hammond, Indiana. According to police reports, those inside the vehicle ran from the scene, and later a Hammond forensic unit discovered DNA and Eddie’s blood in the car, as well as a shell casing.
A couple of months after he went missing and there had been publicity about the case, Eddie’s older sister Jessica Gardner said an anonymous woman contacted her via Facebook, identifying some of the people in a video from a Hammond convenience store police had released. Communication with this person stopped, but it only made Eddie’s family keep pushing for answers.
And they managed to answer a number of critical questions from data his sister pulled from Eddie’s missing cellphone, including his last location at Altgeld Gardens public housing on Chicago’s far South Side.
Other leads were out there, such as grainy surveillance photos of two men in Eddie’s car that Oswego police released in April of 2022. According to news reports, the men in the Charger were last seen in Chicago’s Pullman neighborhood on March 28, 2022.
As the weeks, then months went by, the family tried to hold on to slivers of hope Eddie would be found alive, keeping in touch with all three police jurisdictions – Oswego, Hammond and Chicago – that were involved in the search. Jessica Gardner even made hundreds of flyers and taped them to CTA bus passenger shelters and gas station front doors in the Chicago area where he’d last been known to be alive.
The case went in a new direction at the end of April when Eddie’s old girlfriend reached out to Gardner to say a body that had been found in an abandoned building could be Eddie’s.
“It turned out not to be him but it got me going,” said Gardner, who told me she became familiar enough with the Cook County chief medical examiner to convince him to check other offices for unidentified bodies.
On May 7, she received word a match from dental records was made. Eddie’s skeletal remains had been found six weeks earlier in the basement of an abandoned building in the 6000 block of Sangamon Street in Chicago, just blocks from where his sister had been handing out flyers.
And just like that, this worried and frustrated mom became a grieving but still frustrated mom as she awaits the arrest of her son’s killer or killers.
While police are not revealing many public details about Eddie’s killing, his family members believe more than a half- dozen people are involved. Gardner is also certain “Eddie was killed for his car, his computer and some clothing” he’d recently purchased from a local mall.
“My son did not deserve to die,” she insisted. “He was not a college student. He was evicted and sold drugs. But he was a good kid who got mixed up with the wrong people.”
Gardner says many of Eddie’s problems could be tied to alcoholism on one side of the family, as well as his struggles with ADHD. He “used and sold weed” through his teens, she said, and when COVID-19 hit, he became addicted to oxycodone, even watering it down and selling what he got from doctors.
But he “loved animals and baseball … he was witty and social,” added his mother, and her son had plenty of high school friends, many of whom turned out for his wake June 19 and his funeral Mass at St. Anne Catholic Church in Oswego the following day.
Gardner remains frustrated at what she believes was insufficient interest from local police. But Oswego authorities countered that critique with a two-page list of the department’s efforts on this case that included forensics, interviews, press releases and social media posts, analyzing cellphone and GPS data, traveling repeatedly to Indiana, and partnering with over two dozen agencies, including the Cook County Forest Preserve District for a 170-acre search that involved 10 canines.
Oswego also insists the department and village kept open communication with the family, sharing “what allowable information they can with the family” and using their feedback.
Eddie’s loved ones, however, always felt it was necessary to keep pushing his case forward, and in fact, the family came together via Zoom once a week after he went missing to plan strategies and keep the investigation moving.
“Everyone got involved,” said Gardner’s sister-in-law Candice Hadley, noting especially the Herculean efforts of Jessica and her boyfriend Jack, as well as Sandy’s sister and her husband, Sue and Andy Bennett.
It was “amazing the amount of data Jessica was able to tap into from the missing cellphone,” Hadley noted. “But it was also frustrating. A mother should not have to be the one calling the medical examiner” about dead bodies.
After Eddie Gardner’s body was identified in May, Oswego police turned the investigation over to Chicago police, where a CPD spokesman confirmed it is “an open investigation” and urged anyone with information to contact the department or submit a tip anonymously online at CPDTIP.com.
“This is a murder investigation that can be solved,” insisted Jessica Gardner.
Jessica, who was close to her brother in childhood and is convinced he would have eventually turned his life around, visited the building this spring where Eddie’s body was found. She was accompanied by her mother, aunt and uncle, all of whom were able to meet with the workers who discovered the body and thank them for bringing at least some closure to the family.
“It’s been devastating, but I’m so glad we know now,” said Jessica Gardner, a psychologist with North Shore School District in Highland Park. ”When a loved one is missing, you are always wondering. You see his face in other people on the street. That is much more grueling.
“It was hard when we got confirmation he was dead. But after processing it, I’m glad we now know.”
Both she and her aunt insist it was Sandy Gardner’s incredible strength and perseverance that held the family together through this long nightmare.
“We all are grateful Sandy was able to put Eddie to rest, yet the people who are responsible for his death” are still out there, said Hadley. “I know Sandy will not give up until they have been held accountable.”
Eddie’s mother, an accountant who works from home, says over the years she’s put in countless hours – during lunch breaks, at night and on weekends – investigating and pushing her son’s case as hard as possible.
There are no plans now, she added, to slow down.
“If there is no movement after a few months from Chicago police, I will hire another private investigator. I won’t rest until they are brought to justice,” Gardner insisted. “We don’t want Eddie to be just another statistic.”
dcrosby@tribpub.com
