Bipolar Daughter Needed Help; Her Parents, Answers

Even the women in adjoining cells, many of whom were used to the chaos of lockup, called out to guards on Eilman's behalf.

"I heard that girl screaming for her life, 'Take me to the hospital! Call my parents!' " Tamalika Harris, 26, said in an interview. "The way she was screaming and kicking on the bars, I knew something was wrong."

Another woman in a nearby cell recalled the response of police officers: "Shut up."

In California, Eilman's mother, Kathy Paine, was begging for help too, calling police a dozen times through the night and the next day. How could she rescue her 21-year-old daughter, who suffered from bipolar disorder, was stranded in an unfamiliar city and had been arrested after a disturbance at the airport?

Repeatedly, she says, police told her to call back later.

The last time Paine called on May 8, police told her that Eilman had been released -- alone, in one of Chicago's highest-crime areas.

Three hours later, Eilman plummeted from a seventh-floor window of a nearby public-housing high-rise. The chain of events has raised questions in the police department about whether officers' actions led a vulnerable woman to disaster.

A gang member is awaiting trial on charges that he abducted and raped her, but whether Eilman fell, jumped or was pushed remains a mystery. Although she survived, she will never fully recover from the damage to her body and brain, her doctor said.

Through interviews with three women who were locked up with Eilman and with her parents, a picture of the hours leading to Eilman's fall has emerged.

Police are conducting an internal investigation of officer conduct during the 29 hours Eilman was in custody. Meanwhile, city lawyers are trying to settle a $100-million lawsuit that Rick and Kathy Paine filed on their daughter's behalf.

The Paines, from Rocklin, Calif., north of Sacramento, are focused on their daughter, who is being treated in the brain-injury unit of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago.

Eilman, once a UCLA student, lives in a sort of twilight consciousness, in physical pain and able to make only the most rudimentary responses.

The Paines hope that by speaking publicly, they will pressure the police to change the way officers deal with people who might be mentally ill.