Chicago Police Honor Retired Officer Killed In Afghanistan
CHICAGO (CBS) -- The name of a retired Chicago police officer who friends say had a heart for the poor is now on the memorial wall for all to see, at Gold Star Families Memorial Park alongside Soldier Field.
As WBBM Newsradio's Michele Fiore reports, former Chicago Police Supt. Phil Cline on Monday recalled Officer Thomas Boyle's service to the city.
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"He retired from the 20th District in 2001. Tom was a decorated veteran, an outstanding police officer, and in the truest sense of the word, a hero," Cline said.
Gregory Musgrave worked with Boyle in Iraq in 2007 training police officers, where he says Boyle expressed to him time and again that he was saddened by the country's poverty.
"To show you what kind of man he was, we would drive down the road and see a child almost naked, and dirty, and muddy and all that, and Tom would get out a teddy bear or something, and pass out to him," Musgrave said.
"Tom was a hero in Vietnam, he was a hero in Chicago," longtime friend Steve Kirby, an Elmhurst private investigator, said in June. "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.
Boyle, 62, of Barrington Hills, was killed in Afghanistan in June, in an attack on a coalition forces in Kandahar Province. He'd been working as a civilian security consultant, training Afghan police officers.
