Caseyville board reinstates fired police chief

CASEYVILLE, Ill. (AP) - The village board in Caseyville has voted to reinstate the village’s police chief who was fired last week.

Caseyville Police Chief Jose Alvarez was fired just five months after taking over for a predecessor who killed himself. But board members voted Thursday to reinstate Alvarez. Board member Rick Casey Jr. tells the Belleville News-Democrat (https://bit.ly/1l2HZNt) that he voted to reinstate Alvarez because “the process in which he was fired was not right.”

At the time Alvarez said he wasn’t aware that he’d been fired. When he fired Alvarez, Caseyville Mayor Len Black said he wanted to take a different direction with the city’s police department.

Black hired the 61-year-old Alvarez last September after the suicide three months earlier of former police chief J.D. Roth.

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Information from: Belleville News-Democrat, https://www.bnd.com