Tom Boyle, a retired Chicago police officer, was killed in Afghanistan while training law-enforcement recruits. (courtesy: Boyle family)
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BARRINGTON HILLS, Ill. (CBS) — A retired Chicago Police officer once hailed as a hero locally has been killed by insurgents in Afghanistan.
Tom Boyle, 62, of Barrington Hills died in one of the latest attacks on a coalition forces in Kandahar Province. He’d been working as a civilian security consultant, training Afghan police officers.
He was well-qualified.
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Boyle had been a highly decorated Marine in Vietnam before becoming a Chicago police officer.
“Tom was a hero in Vietnam, he was a hero in Chicago,” says longtime friend Steve Kirby, an Elmhurst private investigator. “He was a hero in 1985 when he caught the Strickland brothers.”
The Strickland brothers, Larry and Tyrone, were fleeing from Wheeling where they had killed a police officer before carjacking an elderly man. Their stolen car crashed in Chicago’s Loop, and they took off, but Boyle chased them, captured them and recovered the murder weapon.
“He was a throwback to the old days,” Kirby says. “A cop’s cop.
After retiring in 2000, Boyle trained police forces in war-torn Kosovo and Iraq and had just begun his second tour in Afghanistan when he was killed.
Boyle’s widow, Pauline, says “he loved what he did.”
Funeral services will be held Saturday June 30 in Barrington.
