The Last Liberal Concept

Working Title: The Last Liberal

BACKGROUND

Evan Rourke is a well-known Chicago public defender, a loud, proud progressive activist. He marches at every anti-ICE rally, speaks at community forums about “abolishing the Second Amendment,” and takes pride in defending undocumented offenders—even those with long rap sheets. His peers celebrate him as a principled idealist. He believes guns are the disease, immigration enforcement is cruelty, and criminals are “victims of systemic oppression.”

He lives in a middle-class neighborhood with his loving wife, Marisa, and two teenage daughters, Anna and Lily. He believes he’s on the right side of history.

Until the night history crashes into his living room.


---

INCITING EVENT

A crew of violent offenders—men he unknowingly helped walk free—break into his home. They rape and murder his wife and daughters in a night of unrestrained savagery. Evan is beaten nearly to death. When he wakes in the hospital, the police investigation is sluggish. The detectives are overworked, understaffed, and cynical. “You know how it is,” they tell him. “Nobody talks.”

Evan discovers that one of the killers was a client he personally defended three months earlier. A man he insisted was “a victim of a broken system.”

The man who slaughtered his family was freed because of him.

Something snaps inside.

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