Marmolejo_Gary_2.jpg

Chicago Police Officer Eduardo Marmolejo, left, and Conrad Gary were hit by a train and killed.| Chicago Police photos

EDITORIAL: A year of heavy hearts and losses for Chicago’s police — and our city

Police officers routinely put themselves in dangerous spots.

It’s part of the job, which they accept, even as the rest of us take it far too much for granted. 

The police run toward the dark and sordid places that most of us would run from. They run into the decrepit drug house. They run down the dark alley. They run toward the menace, not away.

It was a Chicago police officer last month who ran toward a gunman who was shooting up a South Side hospital. He lost his life. It was two Chicago police officers on Monday who ran up on train tracks on the South Side in pursuit of a man with a gun. They, too, lost their lives.

Conrad Gary and Eduardo Marmolejo were doing their job, nothing more or less — just like other good police officers do every day — when they were struck by a commuter train on a cold December evening. They were doing the job of protecting us and, like more than 100 other officers across the country this year, they were killed in the line of duty.

EDITORIAL

“I’m telling you, he was the greatest kid ever,” Mike Gary, Conrad’s father, told the Sun-Times. “He was a great father. Adored his child. He was a great husband. And he was a good police officer. He loved that job. He did it for only 18 months, but he excelled at it.”

Chicago can never get enough fine young officers like Gary and Marmolejo. A city mourns their deaths and grieves with their wives and parents and children.

Gary, 31, was a former Air Force police officer and reservist who grew up in Oak Lawn. Marmolejo, 36, moved from Evergreen Park to West Beverly with his wife and daughters when he joined the force 2½ years ago.

One would have hoped that they had years ahead of them on the force. Instead, they became the third and fourth Chicago officers to lose their lives on the job this year. 

Another young officer, Samuel Jimenez, was killed in the aforementioned Mercy Hospital shootings last month. CPD Cmdr. Paul Bauer was shot and killed in February as he tried to arrest a gunman in the Loop. 

Monday’s tragedy came out of nowhere, which we suppose is always the case. Chicago’s day shift was heading home, but Gary and Marmolejo were still on the job in Rosemoor on the Far South Side. Just before 6 p.m., they got a ShotSpotter notification of gunshots fired near 101st Street and Dauphin Avenue.

ShotSpotter, a multimillion-dollar high-tech crime-fighting tool, did its job. Gary and Marmolejo responded to the call to do theirs.

They confronted a suspect, who ran up to the Metra tracks at 103rd and Cottage Grove. As they walked on one set of tracks, a deafening northbound train approached on the other tracks. The officers apparently never heard or saw the second train coming up behind them.

Supt. Eddie Johnson spoke about it later with a heavy heart. A man never looked so sad. And he wanted us to know that the entire police department, which also lost four fellow officers to suicide this year, was taking it hard. Losing a brother or sister is like that.

“This has been an immensely difficult year for the Chicago Police Department,” Johnson said “especially the men and women of the Fifth District, where they have faced tragedy after tragedy this year.”

FBI statistics for 2018 show that 53 law enforcement officers were killed by offenders while on duty this year, and another 51 were killed accidentally on the job.

The numbers are up, from 45 killed by offenders and 47 killed accidentally in 2017.

It’s been a tough year for cops, indeed.

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