Actress' husband sues Forest Preserve District after she is killed by fallen tree during storm

North Branch Trail

I don't want to come across as heartless, but while I feel sympathy for the husband of  the late Chicago Fire actress, Molly Glynn, his suing the Forest Preserve District of Cook County because a tree fell on her during a violent storm.

From the Chicago Tribune:

Joe Foust, the husband of Molly Glynn, filed the suit in Cook County Circuit Court on Thursday, alleging that the district was negligent in keeping "diseased, defective, weakened" trees, which "presented a risk of harm to persons using the bike path." The suit claims that the district had notice that the trees were weakened.

Glynn, 46, was bicycling with Foust, on Sept. 5 around 3 p.m. on the North Branch Trail, approaching Willow Road, when a storm blew in quickly, officials told the Tribune at the time. A wind gust uprooted a tree, which then fell and struck Glynn, Foust told the Tribune at the time.

Police for the Forest Preserve District responded to the call, and Glynn was taken to Evanston NorthShore Hospital, where she died about midday the next day.

The suit alleges that it was "a large section of a diseased, defective and weakened tree" that broke off and struck Glynn.

Easily the dumbest thing I've done in the last ten years was going out for a ten-mile run on that same trail during an even worse storm in 2011--one so strong that it knocked out power in over 800,000 Chicago area homes, including mine. It appeared to me that the trees were bending backwards that night. I knew the storm was coming, but I didn't figure in the velocity of it when I saw it on radar about ninety miles from Morton Grove.

Anyway, we are talking about a forest. There are trees in a forest. Lots of them. Everything dies, including trees, although that process has been hastened because of the emerald ash borer killing off ash trees.

I remember the day when Glynn was killed. There were dark storm clouds in advance of the high winds. She and her husband should have gotten off the path.

Does Faust and her lawyer expect the Forest Preserve District to mow down every tree on the land it owns?