Page 55 - SEPTEMBE 2018 Newsletter

hree offt officer honore for avin icial man
■ BY DAN CAMPANA
The timing of two officers who had just finished their shift and a lieutenant on his way to work proved to be lifesaving for a suicidal man in July – and it earned the trio recognition as the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation’s Officers of the Month.
It all happened on the morning of July 16 on the Northwest Side, when Lieutenant Antonio Baio, while driving to start his shift, came upon a disturbance on the Nagle Avenue overpass. Baio spotted a visibly upset man walking between vehicles and along a CTA bus in traffic.
According to CPMF officials, Baio approached the scene to investigate the situation when the man said, “This isn’t going to end well, and it may be suicide by cop.” Baio told the man that that wouldn’t happen and worked to defuse the situation. That’s when the man began to climb the fence and move closer to jumping onto the Kennedy Expressway during the busy rush hour.
That’s when Baio grabbed the man’s waist to slow his progress up the fence. Two Jefferson Park-based officers, Robert Roth and Agnieszka Broniec, were heading to court after completing their night shift when they spotted the chaos and rushed to Baio’s aid.
Roth jumped onto the fence and climbed above the man, pulling his tightly gripped hands off the chain-link fence to con- trol him and pull him away from danger. Working in tandem, Baio and Roth were able to pull the man from the fence onto the ground, where Broniec used her handcuffs to control the man and stop his efforts to hurt himself.
“This event highlights that even when off duty, a Chicago Po-
lice Officer will step up and jump into action to handle a situa- tion and, in this case, save a life,” said CPMF Executive Director Phil Cline. “These officers are trained to handle difficult situa- tions, and they must quickly make a determination of the event and act on it. If they weren’t there, another family could have lost a loved one.”
Cline went on to say that the officers wouldn’t suggest they did anything heroic; they were just doing their job.
“But in this case, they weren’t at work, they were two men and [one] woman who saw a situation and took action without con- cern for their own well-being,” Cline added at the award presen- tation ceremony. d
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52 CHICAGO LODGE 7 ■ SEPTEMBER 2018