The death Sunday of Chicago police officer Luis Huesca marked at least the eighth time an Illinois police officer has died from a shooting since 2020, according to Officer Down Memorial Page, a national nonprofit that keeps data on deaths of law enforcement officers.
Huesca is also the third Chicago police officer to be fatally shot in the past two years.
Chicago Police Officer Aréanah Preston was killed last May during an attempted robbery; two months earlier, Andres Vasquez Lasso, another Chicago police officer, died while responding to a domestic incident.
Ella French was shot and killed during a traffic stop in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood in August 2021. She served with the CPD for nearly three and a half years and was assigned to the Community Safety Team. She is survived by her mother and brother.
All four shooting deaths in Chicago since 2020 have occurred on Chicago’s South Side.
Although incomplete, FBI data tracking law enforcement officers killed or assaulted reveals that between 2015 and 2019, a total of 257 officers were killed nationwide.
According to NBC 5 Investigates’ analyzes of this data, 105 police officers killed during this period died while carrying out police work.
Forty-four people were killed in what was described as an ambush, and 15 were classified as having been killed in an unprovoked attack.
The details of what happened to Officer Luis Huesca are still not entirely clear.
What we know: Chicago police responded to a report of shots fired from a ShotSpotter notification shortly after 2:53 a.m. Sunday in the 5500 block of South Kedzie Avenue in Gage Park.
At a news conference Sunday morning, Chicago Police Supt. Larry Snelling told reporters that Huesca was returning home from a shift when the shooting occurred. Authorities said he was in uniform and his vehicle was impounded after the shooting.
“The officer was wearing his uniform, (but) he had something covering him,” Supt. » said Snelling. “We’re still in the preliminary stages at the moment.”
Police are investigating the circumstances of the shooting, including whether the incident began with a carjacking, authorities said.
“What we do know is that the officer’s vehicle was taken, but to know the full motive of what happened, we need more information and the detective division is working on it,” he said. Snelling said Sunday.
On Monday afternoon, police officer Vazquez Lasso’s mother, Rosio Lasso, met with Huesca’s family to offer support.
“It’s very hard,” she told reporters in Spanish, stressing that her son’s memories were being revived.
Huesca and Vasquez Lasso were friends, and Huesca had praised his fellow officer in a video shared on YouTube.
Retired Chicago Police Sgt. Richard Schak, now a criminal justice professor at National Louis University in Chicago, told NBC Chicago that homicide detectives must be thorough in their approach to solving cases involving police officers, even if emotions run high.
“When a police officer is killed, it’s like a member of a family and we all have a family,” Schak said. “The Illinois State Police and Elmwood Park are all part of the same family. This concerns us all. This concerns us all.”
NBC Chicago
