Michelle R.
DiSilvestro

The Order to Slow Down

Michelle R. DiSilvestro’s Chicago docket runs from police gunfire to the Boeing 737 MAX, with lives reconstructed from radio traffic, body-camera video, engineering records, and family testimony.

The Last Ride Home

Verona Gunn left a family cookout on the night of May 25, 2019. The gathering had celebrated a relative’s college graduation. Gunn, an eighty-four-year-old retired Chicago public-school teacher, rode in the back of her daughter’s car beside a nine-year-old child.

At Division Street and Laramie Avenue, her daughter stopped for the sirens. Police vehicles were converging on a call for assistance. The person who had prompted the call had been disarmed, and a dispatcher told the responding officers to reduce their speed. “Slow down,” she said, then repeated the order at least five more times over two minutes.

A Chicago police van entered the intersection against a red light and struck a police sport-utility vehicle. The impact drove the vehicles into the car carrying Gunn. Ten officers and several civilians were injured. Gunn survived long enough to reach the hospital and died there hours later.

DiSilvestro worked on the Romanucci & Blandin team that carried the Gunn case to a Cook County jury. By trial, the City of Chicago had conceded liability. The two-day proceeding concerned what the collision had taken from Gunn’s family. Surveillance video preserved the impact. Gunn’s daughter and granddaughter testified about the woman who had been seated between them and the life that continued around her.

The jury deliberated for about four hours. It awarded $4.93 million, including $4.75 million to Gunn’s estate and damages to the three other people in the car.

The command on the radio had arrived before the crash. Four years later, it remained in the record beside the red light, the video, and the family’s account of Verona Gunn.

Thirteen Shots

Hector Hernandez was twenty-one and the father of two young children. On April 7, 2014, he was at his girlfriend’s home in Gage Park. They had argued; police were called. Hernandez was experiencing an acute mental-health crisis and held a kitchen knife to his own neck.

Officers gathered around a kitchen and dining area of roughly sixty square feet. Patrick Kelly and Antonio Corral stood at the front with their guns drawn. At trial, Hernandez’s family argued that the officers left cover and closed the distance around him. When he tried to move away from the kitchen toward the rear of the home, Kelly and Corral opened fire.

Hernandez was struck thirteen times. Eight bullets entered his back.

DiSilvestro represented his family at the 2022 federal civil trial with Antonio Romanucci, Debra Thomas, and the rest of their team. The jury found both officers and the city liable and returned an award of $1.35 million for Hernandez’s children. The judgment was $742,500 after the jury’s allocation of responsibility.

The verdict reflected the jury’s findings about the officers’ approach, the gunfire, and the resulting loss to Hernandez’s family.

Through the Fence

Another Chicago police case began with a routine drug investigation on June 6, 2018. Maurice, twenty-four, ran from the officers. He was unarmed and climbing a fence when Officer Sheldon Thrasher fired through it, striking him in the back.

The officer’s body-worn camera recorded the shooting. Maurice left two daughters.

The case resolved for $4.25 million. The camera fixed the essential physical facts: the fence between the officer and Maurice, Maurice’s back turned, the bullet traveling through the barrier. The settlement was reached before trial.

Trial on Monday

On March 10, 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa. All 157 people aboard the Boeing 737 MAX 8 died.

One of them was Captain Antoine Lewis, a thirty-nine-year-old Army officer from the Chicago area. He was nearing twenty years of military service. His wife, Yalena Lopez Lewis, was also a soldier; they had two sons. Lewis was traveling through Africa while on leave, studying the possibility of a logistics business that could address supply-chain problems he had seen on the continent.

Lewis’s case against Boeing was set for trial in federal court in Chicago on Monday, April 7, 2025. Antonio Romanucci served as lead counsel for the family, with Robert Clifford leading the broader litigation. DiSilvestro worked on the legal team.

The trial date placed a whole life into evidence-ready form: Lewis’s years of service, the pension he was approaching, the business he intended to build, and the place he held in a military family. The parties settled before the trial began. The terms remain confidential.

DiSilvestro’s aviation work has also reached smaller aircraft and a different measure of recovery. In 2024, she and co-counsel obtained $1 million—the full available policy limits—from a Kansas aviation company for the death of a helicopter pilot.

Exposure Over Time

A toxic-exposure file unfolds along a longer clock. Emissions accumulate. Families change addresses. Diagnoses arrive years after the first contact. Air samples, operating records, epidemiology, pathology, and individual medical histories must eventually meet in the same case.

DiSilvestro has worked on large-scale toxic-tort litigation involving ethylene oxide, a gas used in industrial sterilization and classified as a carcinogen. In April 2025, she presented on ethylene-oxide litigation to the Environmental and Toxic Torts Section of the American Association for Justice. Her broader practice includes medical malpractice, nursing-home neglect, and catastrophic-injury cases, several of which she has resolved after discovery and motion practice as trial approached.

The Mind at Trial

DiSilvestro studied psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and completed a certificate in business. She brings that training into jury communication and trial themes: how jurors receive information, where attention settles, and which facts remain when a technical record becomes a human decision.

She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law in 2021 with a certificate in Trial Advocacy and Dispute Resolution. She served as an administrative editor of the law review and finished second in the Dean Fred F. Herzog Moot Court Competition, arguing for the petitioners in Hernandez v. Mesa, the cross-border shooting case later decided by the United States Supreme Court.

Her law-review article examined Kahler v. Kansas and the constitutional limits of abolishing the traditional insanity defense. In the school’s federal litigation clinic, she assisted underserved clients with clemency petitions and post-conviction work. The subjects that occupied her before admission—state power, mental illness, constitutional remedies, and the exact way a rule reaches a human life—soon entered her trial docket.

DiSilvestro joined Romanucci & Blandin in October 2021. By July 2026, the firm had promoted her to senior attorney. She has served as co-chair of the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association’s Young Lawyers Division and on the executive committee of the Justinian Society of Lawyers.

The Gunn, Murray, Hernandez, and Lewis Cases

Verona Gunn was riding home from a graduation cookout. Maurice was climbing a fence. Hector Hernandez needed help in a crowded kitchen. Antoine Lewis was nearing the end of one career and planning the next.

Each client’s claim arose under a different body of law. Each depended on details small enough to disappear inside a large file: the dispatcher’s words, the direction of the bullets, the position of a body, a Monday trial date, a pension not yet earned.

The police radio preserved the warning to slow down before the impact, and that recording later became evidence at trial.