Seven Found Fatally Shot at Chicago Area Restaurant

Seven people were found fatally shot Saturday in a fast-food restaurant described as a homey place where no one worried about safety or even locked the back door during work hours.

The victims were the restaurant’s two owners and five employees, two of them teen-agers. They were discovered at a Brown’s Chicken and Pasta restaurant in this Chicago suburb shortly after 2:30 a.m., said Deputy Police Chief Walt Gasior.

Police, called by parents of a restaurant employee who did not return home Friday night, found the restaurant’s rear door open and the bodies inside, Gasior said. All had been shot and left in two walk-in coolers at the back of the restaurant, he said.

Gasior declined to comment about suspects or the motive, but he confirmed that police were talking to former and current employees.

Relatives of one victim, restaurant cook Guadalupe Maldonado, said earlier Saturday that police were telling them nothing about how he died.

Maldonado’s brother, Pedro, said the 48-year-old cook had worked at Brown’s only 2 1/2 weeks and was on his first week working nights.

Police tentatively identified the other victims as the restaurant’s owners, Richard E. Ehlenfeldt and his wife, Lynn, and restaurant employees Rico L. Solis, 17; Michael C. Castro, 16; Thomas Mennes, 32, and Marcus Nellsen, 31.

Family and friends of employees gathered around the cordoned-off restaurant throughout the day, some in tears, trying to figure out from the cars left in the parking lot who had been killed.

The last bodies were not removed from the restaurant until after 6 p.m.

Employees Jason Georgi and Celso Morales III, both 17, said they never worried about security at Brown’s, which stands alone at an intersection about 100 yards from a strip of stores.

“It wasn’t like a horrible place to be,” Morales said. “It was sort of homey.”

Workers usually closed the restaurant at 9 p.m. and left within an hour, after counting money from the cash registers and cleaning up, Georgi said. Front doors were locked at closing time, but a back door was left unlocked until the last employee left, he said.

Georgi estimated that the store would accumulate up to $3,000 in cash in its safe.

Seven people usually worked each shift, said Georgi, who had taken Friday night off.

“I’m really glad I wasn’t there, but I feel so bad for them, because someone had to take my place, and if someone who took my place--I don’t know. I feel real bad,” he said.

Fred Brown, the son of the chain’s founder and an owner of four stores in the Chicago area, came to the Palatine police station to help notify families of the victims.

“I feel I owe it to the families and relatives. I do care. It is my name that is on there,” Brown said. “I’m very sorry for them.”

Palatine Mayor Rita Mullins said she was shocked by the crime.

“This touches every family that lives within the community,” she said.

Palatine, 25 miles northwest of downtown Chicago, has about 40,000 residents.