CHICAGO — One Chicago police officer was killed and another was seriously wounded during an exchange of gunfire with at least one suspect during a traffic stop Saturday night in the South Side’s West Englewood neighborhood.
The officer who died was a 29-year-old woman who worked as a Chicao officer since April 2018, officials said. She was the first Chicago police officer to be shot and killed in the line of duty since Mayor Lori Lightfoot took office in 2019.
The other officer is fighting for his life in critical condition at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
“Our hearts ache for the loss of life,” Lightfoot said at a news conference early Sunday outside the hospital.
The shooting happened just after 9 p.m. Saturday near West 63rd Street and South Bell Avenue when the officers conducted a traffic stop on three people in a vehicle, First Deputy police Superintendent Eric Carter said at the news conference.
During the stop, someone opened fire on the officers and the officers returned fire, Carter said. Two officers and one of the suspects were shot.
The officers were taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center while the wounded suspect was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn. He and one other male suspect were in custody; a female suspect remained at large, police officials said.
Both the officer who died and the one who was critically wounded were members of the community safety team, a citywide unit formed last summer under police Superintendent David Brown to respond to crime hot spots.
An overnight email from top Chicago police officials urged the department to “keep the families and friends of these officers in your prayers. Please continue to look out for each other on and off duty as we process this heartbreaking tragedy.”
At the scene, numerous marked and unmarked police vehicles, with their lights flashing, blocked off traffic along West 63rd Street for four blocks between Damen and Western avenues, as well as on side streets all around the site of the shooting. Cook County Sheriff’s Police also were on the scene helping with traffic control.
Outside the ambulance entrance to U. of C. on Cottage Grove Avenue, dozens of Chicago police officers and Cook County sheriff’s personnel stood outside. Both 57th Street and Cottage Grove near the hospital were lined with squad cars.
Officers there exchanged hugs with each other. Some women walked up to the entrance in tears as an officer escorted them.
A Jeep pulled up to the intersection and a passenger rolled down his window and yelled out to a woman on the sidewalk, “What happened over here?”
“Two officers were shot,” she replied.
“Oh, wow,” he said as he shook his head and rolled up the window.
The Fraternal Order of Police Lodge #7, the city’s largest police union, tweeted “Lord, please look over these two Officers, keep them and every Officer out in the 8th District safe tonight. This career of service we all chose is one of sacrifice, but please Lord, not tonight. Not tonight.”
Early Sunday on the Near West Side, dozens of police officers stood along Harrison and Leavitt streets outside the Cook County medical examiner’s office as the female officer’s body was slowly escorted into its dimly lit parking lot by a musical group playing the bagpipes — a tradition for a Chicago cop who dies in the line of duty.
With the roaring of a parked firetruck in the background, scores of officers saluted Chicago Fire Department Ambulance 36 as it moved slowly with its emergency lights flashing.
Some firefighters and paramedics paid their respects, too. Firetrucks stationed across Harrison from one another had their ladders hoisted in midair to the point where they were nearly adjoining, so they could together drape a large American flag in front of the procession for the ambulance.
Dozens of police vehicles, their blue emergency lights flashing, gave the initial escort for the ambulances to the medical examiner’s office from U. of C. hospital, where the officer was pronounced dead.
In 2020, the police department deemed the deaths of four Chicago cops who succumbed to COVID-19 as in the line of duty deaths. Before Saturday night, though, the last line-of-duty deaths of Chicago officers who were killed while pursuing a suspect were in December 2018, when Officers Eduardo Marmolejo and Conrad Gary were fatally struck by a train as they looked for a man wanted for illegally possessing a gun. That suspect, Edward Brown, was sentenced this past April to a year in prison for a felony weapon violation in the case.
Also before Saturday, the last female Chicago police officer to die in the line of duty was Alane Stoffregen who drowned in June 2000 during a training exercise in Lake Michigan while working in the police department’s marine unit. And the last female Chicago officer to be shot and killed in the line of duty was Irma Ruiz, who died in September 1988 when she was shot inside an elementary school on the Near West Side.
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(Chicago Tribune reporter Annie Sweeney contributed to this report.)
