Hobbs Files Suit

A former northern Illinois resident has filed a federal lawsuit against the police officers he says coerced him into wrongfully confessing to the murder of his daughter and her friend.

"They knew that they were wrong, and they just kept going forward with it," Jerry Hobbs says.

Hobbs spent five years in the Lake County Jail after being arrested in the 2005 deaths of his 8-year-old daughter, Laura, and 9-year-old Krystal Tobias in Zion.

"When he was at his most vulnerable and weakest, Jerry Hobbs had just found the brutally murdered body of his daughter. At that point in time, the defendants chose to brutalize and torture Jerry Hobbs to making a confession to that heinous crime," said Hobbs's lawyer Locke Bowman.

He was freed in August after DNA from the crime scene matched another man.

Police began interrogating Hobbs shortly after he discovered the girls' brutalized bodies in a park.

Hobbs says officers physically and psychologically tortured him into confessing.

He says law enforcement agencies can never make up to him what he's lost. His attorney says Hobbs is seeking "a lot of money."

Hobbs now lives in Texas.

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