Dan Sullivan woke from a coma in 1974 after a fight outside a Rogers Park bar that would have been unremarkable if someone hadn’t pulled a gun and shot him in the back.
He realized he was paralyzed from the chest down and had another problem, too.
“He said, ‘Look, you gotta help me here,’” his older brother, Tim Sullivan, recalled. “This psychologist lady can’t get over that I’m not depressed. You gotta help me get rid of her.’ So I said, ‘Well just act depressed for a day or two and that will make her happy and she’ll go away.”
Sullivan, who was 19 — which was the legal drinking age at the time — never let the situation get the better of him, friends and family said.
“Dan never looked back, he never talked about the shooting, never felt sorry for himself, kept looking forward and was always positive,” said his close friend since kindergarten, Pat Flavin.
He’d played football and basketball at Notre Dame High School in Niles but never finished his degree because he was working as a bricklayer and trying to get a union apprenticeship at the time he was shot.
After “the incident” or “the accident” — as Mr. Sullivan and his family referred to the shooting — he earned a GED and learned how to navigate life in a wheelchair.
He went on to earn a degree from Southwest Missouri State University, now known as Missouri State University, where, for the first time in his life, he became an outstanding student.
He later attended law school at DePaul University and became a public defender before being elected as a judge in Cook County, where he worked for 20 years overseeing divorce cases.
Mr. Sullivan died June 19 from injuries he sustained in a single-vehicle car crash a few days earlier. He was 68.
For years, Mr. Sullivan lived with his parents, who, after the shooting, moved from their English Tudor in Edison Park to a wheelchair-accessible ranch house in Park Ridge.
He met his future wife, Susan Kennedy Sullivan, at a charity event.
“The night after they met he called me and said, ‘Hey, Pat, come over and have a beer,’ and he had this s--- grin on his face, and I said, ‘What’s up?’ and he goes, ‘I met somebody,’ and the rest was history,” Flavin said.
They were a perfect match. She had been a nurse for 20 years before becoming an attorney and a Cook County judge.
“One day Dan walked into our parents’ house and announced, ‘I’m buying a house and getting married,’” his brother recalled with a laugh.
Before he was a judge, Mr. Sullivan traveled between suburban courthouses as a public defender, always in a Cadillac with a bench seat and special hand controls. He’d pull himself into the front passenger seat and then pull his wheelchair into the car before maneuvering into the driver’s seat.
“You didn’t want to get in a handshaking contest with him, I tried it once, and he almost broke my hand,” said Gino Peronti, Mr. Sullivans’s friend and former supervisor in the Public Defender’s Office.
Mr. Sullivan defended clients accused of drunk driving, assault and shoplifting, mostly misdemeanors.
“He was a laid-back guy, he was one of these people who could sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, and he would use that style to get excellent dispositions for his clients,” Peronti said.
As a judge, Mr. Sullivan’s courtrooms, first at the Daley Center and later in Rolling Meadows, were outfitted with a special lift that elevated him to the bench.
“He had an excellent reputation and temperament, and it’s hard to have an even temperament,” said Sam Betar, a fellow judge who also oversaw divorce cases. “It was much easier for me to deal with criminals than divorce litigants, it wasn’t as contentious, so I left after 10 years and went to the criminal side.”
Mr. Sullivan hardly ever spoke of the shooting and didn’t seek any attention for overcoming adversity.
“He was just sort of baffled by people who’d say, ‘What an inspirational story!’” said his wife. “I often asked him, I said, ‘Dan, why don’t you just go on the road with this story?’ But he was too humble, he didn’t think it was any big deal, but it was. It was a huge deal, to go through what he did nearly two decades before the Americans With Disabilities Act became law ... he was just an awesome guy.”
Mr. Sullivan enjoyed traveling, including his yearly trips to Florida in the winter and upstate New York in the summer, where he was a regular at the horse track.
“Dan didn’t want any help, he tried to do 99 percent himself,” said Flavin. “His fortitude and tenacity, I saw it unfold. I was always Dan’s right-hand man,” he said.
Mr. Sullivan, who had a great sense of humor, loved a good scotch, a stop in at his “local” — which could have been any number of his favorite watering holes — and was an avid White Sox fan.
“We’d go fishing on a pontoon boat in Northern Wisconsin ... there was nothing he wouldn’t try,” Flavin said.
Services have been held.
