Coroner: Brothers died from drugs; 1 stabbed in back
GRANVILLE – The Putnam County coroner said Wednesday that the younger of two central Illinois brothers found dead in their father’s car died from a combination of a drug overdose and a stab wound in the back.
Coroner Robert Cofoid said Wednesday that the other child died from a drug overdose.
He ruled that the deaths of 9-year-old Duncan Leichtenberg and his 7-year-old brother, Jack, were homicides.
The boys were found dead in their father Michael Connolly’s car March 29 in Putnam County. They had been missing for weeks.
Cofoid said Connolly hung himself and ruled his death a suicide.
The boys’ mother, Amy Leichtenberg of LeRoy, asked the Illinois Judicial Inquiry Board last month to investigate the conduct of a judge who allowed Connolly unsupervised visits with the children
McLean County Circuit Judge James Souk last year allowed Michael Connolly, 40, of Bloomington to start keeping his sons without supervision. Leichtenberg objected, arguing that her former husband had a history of mental illness.
When the family lived in Algonquin a few years ago, Leichtenberg requested an order of protection July 13, 2005, only to ask a McHenry County judge to vacate it a week later, according to McHenry County court records. Leichtenberg wrote that Connolly, then her husband, had destroyed pictures and a plaster imprint of Duncan’s baby handprint during an argument.
Connolly previously had threatened to kill Leichtenberg and to “cut open” her and her parents if she ever took the boys from him, Leichtenberg said in the court records.