August 26th, 2024
DANVILLE — A former Tilton police chief has been sentenced to two years of probation for stealing handguns from the city police department in 2021.
David Cornett, 68, pleaded guilty on Friday to three counts of theft from a law enforcement agency. Vermilion County Judge Robert McIntire accepted the sentence negotiated between the State Appellate Prosecutor’s Office and Cornett’s defense attorney Aaron Weiner.
In exchange for his plea, the state dismissed three counts of official misconduct and one additional count of theft — all misdemeanors.
Cornett first received the charges in March 2023 and was then indicted by a Vermilion County grand jury for having unauthorized control of a 9mm Smith and Wesson handgun, a Colt 45 semi-automatic pistol and .22 pistol from a Tilton Police Department evidence locker in January 2021.
Each of the three items were valued as worth less than $500.
The case was prosecuted by the Illinois Appellate Prosecutor’s Office after Vermilion County State’s Attorney Jacqueline Lacy handed it over to the state office to avoid a conflict of interest, she said last year. Illinois State Police investigated the thefts.
Court records show that Cornett filed a motion in September 2023 to suppress evidence obtained by investigators in 2022.
A Jan. 25, 2024, hearing on that motion established that Cornett first became a patrol officer with the Tilton Police Department in 1996 before he eventually left the agency as chief in 2022.
Cornett was the police department’s evidence custodian when he retired. According to court records, the successor evidence custodian then discovered that there were missing items from the “destruction barrel in the vault” of the department, including a 9mm handgun.
The new evidence custodian contacted Cornett in September 2022 about the handgun, who apparently stated that he had taken the firearm home for safekeeping because a set of vault keys were missing and he didn’t want anyone with the keys to have access to the gun.
Cornett was interviewed by Illinois State Police in October 2022 and Cornett’s wife apparently later returned the missing handgun to the police department.
The ex-chief lodged that the evidence collected and statements he provided from those events should be suppressed as police did not read him a Miranda warning.
But Vermilion County Judge Charles Hall denied the motion during that January 2024 hearing, ruling that none of the three incidents constituted custodial interrogations.
Court records also showed that the three charges of theft Cornett pleaded guilty to were amended down to Class A misdemeanors from Class 3 felonies. Cornett faced up to 364 days in prison for each of the three misdemeanors.
Weiner declined to comment on the case and the prosecutor from the state appellate’s office was not immediately available for further information.
