A 33-year-old Chicago woman who worked at Cook County Jail’s medical facility is facing a felony charge for allegedly smuggling a cellphone into the jail and slipping it into gauze covering a prisoner’s injury.
Dominique Smith-Montgomery, an employee at Cermak Health Services, the jail hospital, was arrested July 23 following an investigation by the Cook County Sheriff’s Department of Investigations and Intelligence, the sheriff’s office said Monday.
Investigators launched an investigation after receiving a tip that Smith-Montgomery may have been having an inappropriate relationship with a detainee. They soon learned that the couple had exchanged hundreds of phone calls and that Smith-Montgomery had brought a cellphone into the jail and given it to the man, according to the sheriff’s office. Investigators searched the man’s cell and recovered a phone and other contraband, authorities said.
After Smith-Montgomery was taken into custody, she allegedly told them that she had hidden the cellphone in her underwear before entering the jail and then slipped it into gauze covering a wound the man had. The sheriff’s office said she did it because she “liked him.”
The Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office charged Smith-Montgomery with bringing contraband into a penal institution. She is now free pending trial. An investigation into the man who received the cellphone remains ongoing, according to the sheriff’s office.
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