Owner of burned Roscoe house still faces 2019 assault charges
Relatives say that the former Rockford policeman went back into the fire to rescue family members.
A Roscoe residence burned down on Tuesday, September 9, 2025, leaving a family homeless. Four people were transported from the scene, and the next day, two remained hospitalized. Neighbors are collecting donations and clothes for the family, including three children. The Community Clothes Closet at First Congregational Community Church in Roscoe has assisted them as well.
Before the fire, besides other family members who lived there, the house had the same owner for more than 20 years: Daniel D. Basile III, a former Rockford Police officer. Relatives say that he went back into the fire to rescue family members. Without his efforts, they say, they wouldn’t have been able to get everyone to safety.
In 2019, Basile admitted to having sex with a female police dispatcher while he was off-duty, after they went from a bar to her house. She pressed sexual assault charges.
Basile denied the woman's claims that she was too drunk to give consent. Nevertheless, a few months later, a grand jury voted to indict Basile for rape. But there proved to be a catch with the indictment. During grand jury proceedings, a juror had asked a detective, “How do we know that the person claims did this to her did it to her?” The detective answered, “He told me he did.” The juror then commented, “That is all I needed to know.”
But had Basile admitted to the detective that he had raped her, or had he merely agreed that he had sex with her? Believing the detective swayed the grand jurors by falsely implying that Basile had confessed to a crime, the Winnebago County trial judge dismissed the indictment against Basile in November 2021. But after an appeal supported by Illinois' Attorney General, the Illinois Supreme Court voted 4-3 in October 2024 to reinstate the indictment, Their reason: by assuming the grand jury had issued the indictment only because of the detective's ambiguous statement, the trial judge had engaged in "unwarranted speculation," wrote Justice David Overstreet.
Following the Illinois Supreme Court ruling, Case 2019-CF-0002828 against Daniel Basile eventually came back to life in March 2025. Basile's next hearing on the 2019 charges is October 23, 2025, at 2 p.m. in Courtroom D with Judge Brendan Maher.
This story has been updated with family accounts of Basile’s heroism,
