Michelle R.
DiSilvestro

Officers responding to a call that night had been told, repeatedly, over dispatch: slow down. Two blocks away, an officer had confronted a man in an alley and called for help; once the man was disarmed, the dispatcher said “Slow down” and said it at least five more times over about two minutes. Gunn’s daughter heard the sirens and stopped at the crosswalk at Laramie Avenue and Division Street. A speeding police van ran the red light, struck an unmarked police cruiser, and both vehicles were pushed into her car. Gunn died hours later on an operating table.

Her son, a pastor, remembered her embracing friends and family at the cookout. “It was almost like she knew she was leaving and she was saying goodbye,” he said.

Michelle DiSilvestro worked on the family’s case with Antonio M. Romanucci and Bhavani K. Raveendran of Romanucci & Blandin and co-counsel Andrew M. Stroth. It was tried to a jury at the Daley Center before Cook County Circuit Judge Janet Adams Brosnahan. The City of Chicago had admitted liability; what remained was the measure of the loss.

The jury deliberated for about four hours, over a Tuesday afternoon and a Wednesday morning. On March 29, 2023, it awarded $4.93 million: $4.75 million to Gunn’s estate and $180,000 to the three other people in the car for their physical injuries and emotional suffering.

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 his girlfriend’s home in Gage Park on April 7, 2014. He had planned to take his young son to Chuck E. Cheese that day. In a kitchen and dinette of about sixty square feet, he held a kitchen knife to his own neck and threatened to harm himself. His family’s case was that Officers Patrick Kelly and Antonio Corral left cover and closed the distance, and that they opened fire as he tried to move toward the back of the home. He was struck thirteen times, eight of the wounds to his back.

In March 2022, DiSilvestro tried the family’s federal civil-rights case with Antonio M. Romanucci, Bhavani K. Raveendran and Debra L. Thomas. Their argument was that deadly force was not justified against a man threatening only himself. The jury found Kelly, Corral and the City of Chicago liable, and Hernandez’s two children are to receive $742,500.

Her police-accountability work also includes the family of Maurice Granton Jr., a twenty-four-year-old father of two young daughters. On June 6, 2018, near 47th Street and Prairie Avenue in Bronzeville, he was running from Officer Sheldon Thrasher and trying to climb a fence when he was shot in the back. In July 2022 the Chicago City Council approved a $4.25 million settlement with his family, and that September the Police Board voted unanimously to fire Thrasher.

Flight 302

On March 10, 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed about six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa for Nairobi. 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 Matteson, in suburban Chicago, who was approaching twenty years of service and the full military pension that would come with it. His wife, Yalena Lopez Lewis, was also a soldier; they had two sons. Lewis was traveling in Africa on military leave, exploring a logistics business aimed at the continent’s supply-chain failures.

DiSilvestro worked on the family’s case against Boeing in federal court in Chicago with Antonio M. Romanucci, the family’s lead counsel. Trial was set to begin on April 7, 2025. That day the family’s lawyers announced a settlement, on confidential terms.

In October 2024, with co-counsel, she obtained a $1 million settlement, the full limits of the policy, from a Kansas aviation company for the death of a helicopter pilot.

The Long Latency

Ethylene oxide is a colorless gas used to sterilize medical equipment and plastic devices that cannot be sterilized by steam, about twenty billion medical devices a year, half of all medical devices in the United States. The capacity to damage DNA that makes it a sterilant accounts for its cancer-causing activity, and people who live near facilities that produce or use it can be exposed through uncontrolled industrial emissions. Female breast cancer and certain lymphohematopoietic cancers have consistently been associated with it; Illinois health officials have put the latency at four to ten years for lymphohematopoietic cancers and ten to fifteen years for solid tumors.

DiSilvestro’s practice includes mass toxic-tort litigation, and in April 2025 she presented at a Chicago lunch-and-learn on ethylene oxide held by the Environmental and Toxic Torts Section of the American Association for Justice. She also handles medical-malpractice cases and other catastrophic-injury matters, including wrongful-death claims, and has settled several personal-injury and medical-malpractice cases on the eve of trial.

The Echo in the Moot Courtroom

DiSilvestro studied psychology and earned a certificate in business at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, then graduated magna cum laude from the University of Illinois Chicago School of Law with a certificate in Trial Advocacy and Dispute Resolution. She served as administrative editor of the law review, and in the school’s Pro Bono Federal Litigation Clinic she assisted underserved clients with clemency petitions and post-conviction relief.

She joined Romanucci & Blandin in October 2021 and was named a senior attorney in July 2026. She has co-chaired the Illinois Trial Lawyers Association’s Young Lawyers Division and served on the executive committee of the Justinian Society of Lawyers.

Her law-review article examined Kahler v. Kansas, in which the Supreme Court considered whether a state could replace the traditional insanity defense with the mens rea approach. Discussing a study of Montana’s experience, she wrote: “the increase in convictions confirms that the mens rea approach exposes severely mentally ill offenders to imprisonment and unjust punishment.”

In 2019, in the Dean Fred F. Herzog Moot Court Competition, she had argued for the petitioners in Hernandez v. Mesa, a suit over a boy of fifteen shot and killed by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in the concrete culvert between El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. In March 2022, she tried a real police-shooting case, for the children of Hector Hernandez.