Page 61 - FOP June 2019 Magazine

C hoors officers who saed woa fro aacer
■ BY DAN CAMPANA
Late on the night of June 23, 2018, a call for help in a River North high-rise escalated into a much more dangerous incident for three Chicago Police Officers, who likely saved the life of a woman before being attacked by the assailant.
The trio of Sergeant Andy Dakuras and Officers John Norwood Jr. and Julio Rodriguez III earned the Chicago Police Memori- al Foundation’s Officer of the Month awards for their actions to subdue the man who choked and bit a woman in what officials described as an unbelievably bizarre situation.
Officials said Dakuras exited an elevator on the 31st floor of the building just before 10 p.m. to hear screams for help from a woman. He pounded on the door and yelled to occupants of the apartment that he was a police officer. With no response and the woman’s pleas for help continuing, Dakuras forced his way in to find the woman on the kitchen floor sitting upright with a man di- rectly behind her with his forearm around her neck, choking her.
Dakuras was most startled by the fact that the man was biting the flesh off the woman’s cheek and face. He ordered the man to let her go and used force to get the man to stop, but the man was in an altered state of mind, with a look in his eyes that Dakuras had never seen before, officials explained. Dakuras tried to pull the man away and used every tactic possible to free the woman, who was being choked to death.
As a last resort, Dakuras emptied an entire can of pepper spray into the man’s mouth. The tactic caused the man to release the woman, who had been severely injured — including having half of her ear bitten off.
For six minutes, Dakuras and the man struggled in what Dak- uras called a “high school wrestling match” on the floor. At one
point, the man bit Dakuras’ arm as the pair battled. When the man refused to release his clenched jaw, Dakuras tried to attack pressure points on the man’s head. Dakuras eventually cut off airflow to the man’s nose, which caused him to finally open his mouth for air — a move that allowed Dakuras to free his arm from the man’s grip.
That’s when Norwood and Rodriguez from the summer mobile force barged into the apartment and joined the fray. However, the man still resisted before the officers were able to handcuff and transport him to a local hospital for treatment. The woman also was hospitalized in serious condition.
The officers later learned that during the struggle with Daku- ras, the man was trying to get a loaded .38-caliber handgun from another room. CPMF leaders said they were thankful that Da- kuras prevented the man from grabbing the weapon and likely stopped another tragic incident from occurring.
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