Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Fox River Grove, IL

Fox River Grove is a village on the southern shore of the Fox River that straddles two counties — Algonquin Township in McHenry County and Cuba Township in Lake County — about 42 miles northwest of Chicago.

The village was officially incorporated in 1919, becoming the ninth village in McHenry County, and it celebrated its centennial in 2019, the same year it became a debt-free village.

Fox River Grove had a population of 4,702 at the 2020 census, living in 1,762 households, of which about 59.5% were married-couple households.

Some of the village's first settlers were Czechoslovak immigrants who built a Bohemian enclave along the Fox River; ethnic-Czech settler Frank Opatrny bought 80 acres on the river's southern shore in 1850 and is considered the patriarch of the founding family.

In 1899 Frank Opatrny's son Eman turned the family homestead into the Fox River Picnic Grove, a sprawling amusement park with a dance pavilion, boathouse, bowling alley, shooting gallery, horse track and excursion boat that drew trainloads of Chicago pleasure-seekers; the village bought 40 acres of the site in 1994 and it survives today as Picnic Grove Park.

Fox River Grove is home to the Norge Ski Club, founded in 1905 by a group of Norwegian men from Chicago — it is the oldest continuously operating ski club in the United States and hosts international ski jumping competitions on its jumps.

The Norge Ski Club is a genuine Olympic pipeline: three of its members were named to the men's U.S. Olympic ski jumping team in 2018, and three more made the team again in 2022.

During Prohibition, Fox River Grove was a notorious gangster playground — Louie's Place and its Crystal Ballroom hosted big bands like Glenn Miller's as well as members of the Dillinger and Barker-Karpis gangs, and outlaw "Baby Face" Nelson was killed by federal agents in the nearby 1934 Battle of Barrington.

Luxembourg immigrant Theodore "Teddy" Bettendorf spent 36 years, starting in 1931, hand-building Castle Vianden along Route 14 — a Luxembourg-style castle with eight towers, a guard room, a dungeon and a wishing well that still stands as a private residence.

On October 25, 1995, a Metra express train struck a Cary-Grove High School bus at a Fox River Grove rail crossing, killing seven students; the tragedy led to nationwide reforms in safety standards for rail crossings interconnected with traffic signals.