Slain officer’s boyhood friend: ‘He was so happy to wear that uniform’

Practically everyone in the group of friends had a nickname. Felipe was Piña. Brayan was El Negro. And Mauricio was Flaco (“slim”), because of his lanky figure.

They all grew up together in Cali, Colombia, and while each went their separate ways, they stayed in touch — even Flaco, who went all the way to Chicago, eventually becoming a police officer. Last week, Mauricio, whose full name was Andrés Mauricio Vásquez Lasso, was shot and killed while responding to a domestic violence incident on the Southwest Side.

Vásquez Lasso returned to Colombia often.

“He always came back to say hi, and always had the same smile, the same character. Always,” Brayan Liloy, said in a telephone interview from Colombia Thursday, the same day as his friend’s funeral.

Hearing the news of his friend’s murder was like “getting hit in the head,” Liloy said. He began to cry. His wife asked what had happened, but it was awhile before he could speak.

“‘They killed my brother,’” he told her, at last. “‘They killed my brother.’”

Liloy and Vásquez Lasso, who was a year younger, grew up on the same block. They studied together, worked the same jobs. Once, they even dated twins. They defended each other against school bullies and muggings on the streets of Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city.

Provided

When they were about 16, they had jobs bagging food at a grocery store. After work one day, they were accosted out front by a man who flashed a knife.

He was just one guy, though, Liloy recalled, and Vásquez Lasso raised his eyebrows at his friend, as if to say, “Come on, we can take him.”

The two rushed the thug, knocking the knife out of his hands. They kept their money and were nearly unscathed, though Vásquez Lasso was hit in the face. They put a steak on that when he got home.

Then came the day Vásquez Lasso followed some of his cousins to Chicago, where one cousin had joined the police department.

“He always had that dream of being a police officer, even when he was in Colombia,” Liloy said. The cousin, Liloy said, “didn’t even have to convince him with words. He saw what he was like, protecting the community, and he wanted to do it.”

Liloy recalled how happy Vásquez Lasso was after he finally joined and how happy his friends in Colombia were for him.

“To become a police officer in another country, that’s really it,” Liloy said. “You made it — like becoming an astronaut.”

Provided

The two friends last saw each other in December, when Vásquez Lasso and his wife, Milena, visited Cali.

Vásquez Lasso was happy, like always — but said some sobering things about the job.

“‘I don’t know which call is going to be my last,’” Vásquez Lasso told him, he said. “‘Everyone has guns, and they’re always shooting.’”

“He was very emphatic about it,” Liloy said.

Liloy said he couldn’t fall asleep, thinking about those conversations the night after Vásquez Lasso died.

Still, it shocked him.

“Some things you never think are going to happen, especially to him. He was so happy, and he had all his family there. He didn’t lack anything. His dream was made reality,” he said.

“It’s so hard not to see him smiling,” Liloy told the Sun-Times.

“But he dieddoing what he loved — defending people,” Liloy said. “There wasn’t a prouder police officer in the world. He was so happy to wear that uniform.”

Michael Loria is a staff reporter at the Chicago Sun-Times via Report for America, a not-for-profit journalism program that aims to bolster the paper’s coverage of communities on the South Side and West Side.