Ill. Parade Shooting: Chief Knows Personal Toll of Gun Violence

In Tinley Park, there is a playground Rick Bruno visits with his grandchildren.

"I told them it was named for a friend of mine, a very nice man," Bruno said.

Jogmen Playground in Centennial Park opened in the early 1990s as Tinley Park's first playground for children with disabilities. It is named for Louis Jogmen, a former Tinley Park police officer seriously wounded July 12, 1977, when he was shot in the head at point-blank range while responding to an armed robbery of a convenience store. He miraculously survived.

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Jogmen's son, Louis, was 7 at the time. In April, when he was sworn in as president of the Illinois Association of Chiefs of Police, he talked about the trauma of the shooting and how his "family was restored because of the care and compassion of others."

Now, as police chief in Highland Park, Jogmen is trying to help his community come to grips with a mass shooting at a Fourth of July parade that left seven dead and some 30 injured.

His father, 36 at the time of the shooting, spent two months in a coma, then required several surgeries and extensive occupational, physical and speech therapy sessions. Bruno, who had been with the Tinley Park force for just a month when Jogmen was shot, was one of several officers volunteering to help transport his fellow officer to therapy.

"There was a sign-up sheet at the police station," Bruno said Tuesday. "Guys were scrambling to help the family out."

Officers and their wives helped with chores such as laundry, cooking, maintaining the lawn and even offering to paint the interior of the Jogmen home, said Bruno, who rose to the level of commander and retired in 2010.

"We just did everything we could to help ease the burden on his family," he recalled.

It was about 10:30 p.m. the night Jogmen was shot when he was the first officer to respond to a possible holdup at a 7-Eleven store at 159th Street and 76th Avenue, where Donald Villa was holding three men and a woman at gunpoint inside the store.

Villa was threatening to shoot the woman, and "at that point, Officer Jogmen made the only decision that he felt he could live with," his son said at his swearing-in ceremony in April.

"He could not bear to see this woman killed. In that brief instance, he struck a deal with the suspect. My dad offered to exchange himself for her so that she could go free," the Highland Park chief told fellow officers during the chiefs' association's annual conference in Northbrook, according to a record of the event.

Jogmen noted that it was taking place during National Crime Victims' Rights Week, pointing his own relationship with crime victims as a police officer and a victim of violent crime himself.

Villa, armed with a handgun, had ordered Jogmen to give up his service revolver, used the officer's handcuffs to restrain him then ordered him facedown on the pavement just outside the store's front door, according to evidence presented in court during Villa's trial and subsequent appeals.

Villa was standing up, straddling Jogmen, when he fired a shot into the officer's skull, according to court documents.

A portion of the bullet remained lodged in Jogmen's brain, and doctors determined removing it would cause more harm than leaving it intact, according to court documents.

Other officers arrived at the store and one of them shot Villa, who was left paralyzed from the waist down, after he had shot Jogmen.

Villa was later convicted of charges including attempted murder and sentenced to a term ranging from 30-90 years in prison, later dying in a state-operated hospital. Through actions filed in state and federal courts, he had unsuccessfully attempted to secure a new trial or have his sentence reduced.

Jogmen was able to recover to the point where he could walk, talk and drive, and was honorary captain for the Tinley Park department's softball team, Bruno said.

"I still am stunned by his courage but maybe I shouldn't be," Bruno said of Jogmen's recovery. "I realize that, hey, this is something police officers do. He was one of my heroes."

The elder Jogmen died in June 1986 due to complications from cancer, according to his son.

Bruno said that Jogmen "had a very dry personality and was a very funny guy."

After Jogmen had recovered, "everybody would say 'That's the same Lou.' He didn't lose anything," Bruno said.

Each time Villa was up for parole, Tinley Park officers gathered thousands of signatures on petitions aimed at keeping him behind bars.

Bruno said that how officers responded to Jogmen's shooting and their outpouring of help has always stayed with him.

"At that very difficult time, I was a very impressionable young officer," he said. "It showed me how much each individual officer was valued."

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