The beast Marvin Powell is out of prison, released the other day on parole after serving six years for what he did to Christina Eilman.

He's a gang-banger, 6 feet tall, about 200 pounds, arms covered with tattoos. Some tats are memorials to dead comrades, but who they are and how they fell doesn't matter.

It's what happened to Eilman, the young woman suffering from bipolar disorder, that matters. And what is on his left arm also matters.

One tattoo says "Lord have mercy on my soul." And the other says "Pay me."

Pay me.

That's what Chicago taxpayers are going to do. They're going to pay. They won't pay Powell. He's already paid some of what he owes, doing time for kidnapping and confining her in an abandoned apartment in a South Side housing project where she was sexually assaulted.

And then she either jumped or was pushed from the seventh floor. She can't tell us, because she suffered irreparable brain damage from the fall.

If that tattoo about his soul means anything to Powell, then he'll have to wait until he's dead to pay the rest of what he owes. But the taxpayers will have to pay for what the Chicago police did to Eilman — releasing a mentally ill woman into a crime-ridden area where she was vulnerable to attack. And what Mayor Richard Daley's administration did later is also outrageous, dragging this case out year after year after year, as her family struggled to care for her.

I'm told the price tag could possibly be as high as $80 million, a wild sum until you consider what was done to her, by the thugs and the police and City Hall.

So now Mayor Rahm Emanuel's administration has to clean up another Daley mess. And that's not the only one that Daley's law department left behind.

There are other cases pending that could cost additional millions, like the one involving the cop who mercilessly beat up the bartender, yet another case stalled by Daley's City Hall. But the Eilman case looms largest.

"There's no question that this case has been kicked down the road," a city official told me Thursday. "And there's no question the outcome was tragic. And if you're trying to outline a made-for-TV movie, or novel, it plays all the cards, race and sexual violence, brutality and so on. We understand that. But we have to protect the taxpayers.

"We're trying more cases. But we've inherited a backlog," said the official. "These are ugly cases from an exposure standpoint. And the politics are ugly. But we'll try this one if we have to."

Whether this case is settled or not won't be determined for some time. What was determined Thursday, however, is how the police treated her.

"They might as well have released her into the lion's den at the Brookfield Zoo," wrote the United States 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, in an opinion allowing the case to go to civil trial.

What happened to her has already been revealed by the dogged reporting of the Tribune's David Heinzmann. He's been on this relentlessly since it began in 2006, and many of the details he found were reflected in the federal appellate opinion.

Eilman had made a scene at Midway Airport and was taken into police custody, where she screamed "take me to the hospital" and later kicked at the bars of her cell and exhibited other bizarre behavior.

She spent 29 hours in custody, ending up in the lockup at 51st and Wentworth. Her father called from California, trying to tell police that his daughter was mentally ill. Officials blew it off.

Then they did something unconscionable. They let her go, out into the South Side a few blocks from the notorious housing project known as Robert Taylor Homes.

The justices noted that she would have stood out as a stranger, as a potential victim in the wrong place. A white girl, a California blond in a midriff top, tight white shorts and boots, was let loose in no condition to take care of herself in a black neighborhood that was one of the roughest in the city.

Careful readers know I avoid mentioning the race of people in my columns unless it's relevant. And it's only relevant here because the justices cited it as a reason why she would have been vulnerable — in the same way a judge noted during oral arguments that it would have been like dropping off a black man into the middle of a Ku Klux Klan rally.

The way she was dressed, the way she looked, the color of her skin, all of it made her stand out in a violent neighborhood, and the police should have realized this, the justices said.

"They did not warn Eilman about the neighborhood's dangers," the justices wrote. "They did not walk her to the nearest CTA station, from which she could have reached a safer neighborhood in minutes. They did not drive her back to the airport where she could have used her ticket to return to California. They did not put Eilman in contact with her mother, who had called the stationhouse repeatedly."

Once released, she walked a few blocks, then was coaxed into the building. Some folks tried to help her but didn't help enough. She was taken up to the seventh floor. Then she was set upon.

Those were the acts of criminals. They come in all colors and sizes. They prey upon the weak.

But City Hall also preyed on the weak, by dragging this on and on, stalling, year after year after year, preying upon Eilman and her family.

That's over. Now it's time to pay.

jskass@tribune.com