Linda Mensch, a well-known attorney in the music and film industry and a board member with the homelessness prevention advocacy organization A Save Haven, died this week in a hit-and-run on the city’s West Side.
Police said around 3:50 p.m. Thursday, a black GMC Savana cargo van hit the 70-year-old woman in the 300 block of North Central Park Avenue, near Fulton Boulevard in East Garfield Park.
Mensch’s daughter, Jess Heyman – an attorney with New York County Defender Services in Manhattan – told CBS 2 the details of what she heard.
“He hit her initially I guess, and then got out of the car and went back in, and then drove off and dragged her body under the car for a number of feet,” Heyman said.
Heyman said the driver was going at a very “crazy speed” and driving recklessly, and believes it is likely that Mensch might have died as a result of being dragged.
Mensch was a New York native who friend and colleague Lynn Orman Weiss said became a “Chicago warrior for the arts – musicians, writers, authors, filmmakers – and a fierce advocate for artists’ rights.”
Mensch had served as vice president and president of the Chicago Recording Academy in the 1990s, and launched a pre-Grammy party in Los Angeles where all the Chicago artists and nominees performed, Orman Weiss wrote.
