You got to remember one thing about Chicago Police, you fuck them, they will fuck you up. This guy was lucky. He was lucky not to be taken in, and beaten to a inch of his life. Then taken to 26th and Cal, and beaten some more.
If this dude broke into my home, I would of capped him.
c-rock
www.illinois-shooter.org
Vacuum, .44 Magnum raise 'Dirty Harry' questions for police
Posted on June 11, 2001
"Do you feel lucky, punk?"
Karen Cole must have imagined that famous movie question as she watched an off-duty Chicago policeman take aim at the head of a cowering villain.
"Go ahead, make my day."
Cole could almost hear Dirty Harry's favorite challenge being presented to the bad guy on his knees, by the man hovering overhead with a .44 magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world.
This scene played out in a Northwest Side Chicago park according to Cole, who says she was on her lunch hour, just trying to enjoy a few peaceful minutes away from the office.
"The gun was to his head for approximately five minutes," says Cole. "He was on his knees, visibly shaking, before he was allowed to get up."
At the time, Cole didn't know what was going on. She didn't know it was, as she learned later, an off-duty cop and a suspected thief. She simply saw one guy with a gun pressing it to another guy's cranium.
When the guy on his knees got up, Cole says he climbed into a car and threw out a vacuum cleaner ... apparently a vacuum that had just been stolen from the police officer's home.
"The one with the gun let him drive away, while pointing the gun (it looked like a .44 Magnum Desert Eagle) down the 8500 block of Chester, with no regard for the people and children in Grandparents Park, where I was sitting on my lunch hour," Cole said.
So she did what any concerned citizen would do. "I called 911 from my cell phone."
"A uniformed officer arrived in the park on foot, and I told him what I witnessed. He said he believed the man with the gun is an off-duty officer!
"I said 'No way, I think he's a drug dealer!' If he believed he was off-duty, he didn't go and talk to him as he was still holding the gun and standing on the corner of Chester and Catalpa," she recalls of the incident.
"When a squad arrived at the scene, the officer on foot then went closer to the scene, as the gun was now in his jeans waistband! I went closer to the scene and asked the uniform if the guy was an off-duty officer. He said he was."
Cole, 42, cites her background in law enforcement as evidence that she speaks from a position of some knowledge. She was an Army intelligence officer, a youth supervisor for the Illinois Department of Corrections and an investigator for the Illinois Department of Human Rights. Currently she is a police liaison with a large cellular telephone company, handling wiretap authorizations and subpoenas.
After witnessing the city park showdown, Cole says she went to the closest police district headquarters "to make a complaint to the desk sergeant regarding the reckless and dangerous behavior I witnessed."
She says that the sergeant "looked on the computer and said there was a report of a suspicious person in that area and the off-duty officer was on police business.