Michelle R.
DiSilvestro
Civil Rights, Aviation, Toxic Torts, and Wrongful Death
The increase in convictions confirms that the mens rea approach exposes severely mentally ill offenders to imprisonment and unjust punishment.
The Order to Slow Down
Verona Gunn spent the evening of May 25, 2019 at a family cookout celebrating a relative's college graduation. She was eighty-four, a retired Chicago public-school teacher, a great-great-grandmother. When the party ended she rode home in the back seat of her daughter's car, next to a nine-year-old child.
Officers responding to a call that night had been told, repeatedly, over dispatch: slow down. A police van ran a red light anyway, collided with an unmarked police cruiser, and drove it into the car carrying Gunn. She survived long enough to reach the hospital and died there hours later.
Michelle DiSilvestro worked on the Romanucci & Blandin team that carried the family's case to trial. By the time the two-day proceeding opened in Cook County, the City of Chicago had conceded liability; what remained was the measure of the loss. Surveillance video reconstructed the intersection. Gunn's daughter and granddaughter testified about the woman who had been seated between them and the life still moving around her — the church, the family, the decades of students.
After about four hours of deliberation, the jury awarded $4.93 million: $4.75 million to Gunn's estate and $180,000 to the three other people in the car.
Thirteen Shots in Gage Park
Hector Hernandez was twenty-one, the father of two young children, and in acute mental-health crisis when police were called to a Gage Park home on April 7, 2014. His family's case was that Officers Patrick Kelly and Antonio Corral left cover and closed the distance as he tried to move away. He was struck thirteen times, eight of the wounds to his back.
DiSilvestro tried the 2022 federal civil-rights case with Antonio Romanucci, Debra Thomas, and their team. The jury found both officers and the city liable, and the court entered a $742,500 judgment for Hernandez's children.
Her police-accountability work also includes the family of Maurice Granton Jr., an unarmed twenty-four-year-old father of two daughters, shot through a fence by Officer Sheldon Thrasher as body-camera footage captured him climbing it. The case resolved for $4.25 million before trial.
Flight 302
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 nearing twenty years of service. His wife, Yalena Lopez Lewis, was also a soldier; they had two sons. Lewis was traveling through Africa on leave, studying the possibility of a logistics business that could solve supply-chain problems he had seen firsthand on the continent.
DiSilvestro represented his family in the litigation selected for the first federal trial arising from the disaster, set to begin in Chicago on April 7, 2025. She helped build the record that would have carried the family's claim to a jury — the service history, the pension mathematics, the business Lewis was planning, the household he anchored. The case settled before trial on confidential terms.
Her aviation work also includes a 2024 resolution recovering the full $1 million policy limits from a Kansas aviation company for the family of a helicopter pilot.
The Long Latency
Toxic-exposure cases run on a different clock: air samples, operating records, epidemiology, and pathology must be aligned with individual medical histories across years or decades of latency. DiSilvestro works on large-scale litigation involving ethylene oxide, a carcinogenic gas used in industrial sterilization, and in April 2025 presented on ethylene-oxide litigation to the Environmental and Toxic Torts Section of the American Association for Justice. Her practice also spans medical malpractice, nursing-home neglect, and catastrophic injury, with several matters resolved as trial approached, after discovery and motion practice had done their work.
The Echo in the Moot Courtroom
DiSilvestro studied psychology and completed a business certificate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, then 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, a cross-border police-shooting case. Within a year of graduating she was preparing a real police-shooting case for a real federal jury.
Her law-review article examined Kahler v. Kansas and the constitutional stakes of abolishing the traditional insanity defense. She wrote: “the increase in convictions confirms that the mens rea approach exposes severely mentally ill offenders to imprisonment and unjust punishment.” In the school's federal litigation clinic, she assisted underserved clients with clemency petitions and post-conviction work — an early version of the conviction that runs through her practice: the people least able to summon the system's attention deserve its full machinery.
DiSilvestro joined Romanucci & Blandin in October 2021 and was promoted to senior attorney by July 2026. 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.