The scene this afternoon in the South Chicago neighborhood, where a Chicago police officer was shot. (Terrence Antonio James/ Tribune photo) MORE PHOTOS
Police are offering a $10,000 reward as they investigate the deaths of a Chicago police evidence technician and a former CHA officer who were gunned down Friday afternoon while the police officer was investigating a burglary in a South Chicago alley.
It is the fifth time in six months that a Chicago police officer has been shot and killed -- and the second time in just a week.
Michael Flisk, 46, was two months from celebrating 20 years on the job and had a wife and four children, according to Supt. Jody Weis. Three of his siblings are also on the force.
"It's surreal. Even when I was told, it didn't resonate," said Flisk's sister-in-law, Gina Flisk.
"He was the one who kind of smoothed everything over with everybody,'' she said. "He wasn't the oldest, but he was the one who kind of took care of making everybody happy."
The former CHA officer was identified by family members as Stephen Peters, 44, who was married with three sons.
"He was a good guy, hard-working. He loved his family," said his sister Pamela Reed, who added that he was a car aficionado known as " Superman'' in a Mustang car club.
Reed said her mother heard four shots from inside her home -- in two different bursts -- then looked out the window. "She saw my brother lying out in the alley dead," Reed said.
Peters called police just after noon after discovering that someone had broken into his Mustang GT in a garage in the 8100 block of South Burnham Avenue on Friday afternoon.
Flisk, in uniform and driving a marked squad car, was dispatched about half an hour later. Residents said they heard gunshots about 1:30 p.m. Arriving minutes later, officers found Flisk and Peters lying in the alley mortally wounded.
What happened in that hour is unclear.
In the aftermath of the shootings, Chicago police sealed off the South Chicago neighborhood with crime scene tape and squad cars and began an aggressive search of alleys and trash bins, using dogs.
SWAT officers and tactical teams -- some carrying M4 rifles -- swarmed the area. Motorists and pedestrians were stopped and questioned or asked for identification.
"We will squeeze that neighborhood, and we will find the people who did this,'' a visibly tense Supt. Jody Weis said outside Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
Stunned shoppers on Black Friday stared as a line of squad cars escorted Flisk's body from Northwestern Memorial Hospital on the Near North Side to the Cook County medical examiner's office on the Near West Side.
Officers cried in the cold night outside the morgue.
Flisk was the sixth Chicago police officer to die violently this year. A sergeant died in a car crash in February while responding to a burglary. Since May, four other officers -- all off-duty -- had been gunned down.
The latest of those killings took place just four days earlier when Officer David Blake was found slain in his SUV. No arrests have been made in that killing.
A longtime officer who heads up the patrol officers union called 2010 the deadliest year for Chicago cops in recent memory.
"There hasn't been a year this bad since the 1960s," said Mark Donahue, president of the Fraternal Order of Police. Officers "are just trying to cope."
Flisk's job as an evidence technician is one of the unheralded but critical roles in the department. Technicians arrive at a scene -- often alone -- after a crime has been committed to comb for evidence that could lead to an arrest. They rarely get the accolades when their work helps solve murders, rapes and even burglaries.
But the job usually keeps them from the front-line danger many officers face daily.
"It was supposed to keep him safer,'' neighbor Pauline Lewellyn, sobbing in her Beverly kitchen, said of his promotion to evidence technician 3½ years ago.
A plainclothes officer walking to his unmarked car from the morgue said the latest slaying of a officer has stunned the department.
"This was out of nowhere," said the officer, who did not give his name. "They're targeting us like (anyone) out there. I don't know if this was just opportunistic or what.
"They feel like if they can hurt one of us they can get us to slow down, lay off them. But that's not going to happen. This is going to light the fire in us."
An officer climbing into a squad car marked Forensic Investigation said he was an evidence technician like Flisk. Though the officer said he didn't know Flisk, he choked up as he remarked that the veteran officer likely would have had his last meal with his own family at Thanksgiving.
"You thank God that he had that meal with his family," he said, pausing to pull off his glasses to wipe tears from his eyes. "This hurts, you know?"
A colleague of Flisk, who was in the same evidence technician class, described him as a "really quiet guy. A really nice guy."
The officer said many of the fingerprints Flisk inventoried at crime scenes, especially burglaries, would lead to a suspect's identity.
"You can tell he was great because he had so many hits," the colleague said.
Flisk came from a family that dedicated their lives to public safety. All but one of Flisk's four siblings were also Chicago police officers. Their father, also named Michael, retired after about three decades with the Chicago Fire Department.
In his home in the Beverly neighborhood on the Southwest Side, Flisk was a neighbor who fixed cars and organized block parties. He was a regular at his son's baseball games. He "wore his heart on his sleeve," one neighbor said.
Gina Flisk said her children looked up to their Uncle Mike. When she told her daughter, she said, "I'm like a turtle and Uncle Mike was my shell, and now that he's gone, a part of me is missing."
On the officer's block in Beverly, neighbors came to his home to pay their condolences.
"He was one of the nicest guys you would ever meet," said Virginia Espinola, who lives a couple of doors down from the officer. "He was very calm, laid-back and quiet."
Espinola said that when she heard from another neighbor that the officer had been shot, it took her breath away.
"I just didn't believe it at first," she said. "He was one of the last guys you could have imagined this happening to."
The officer was very involved in the community, she said, organizing block parties with his wife and fixing cars for his neighbors. Espinola's son Matthew said he plays baseball with a teenage son of the officer and described the officer as "an involved father."
"He was at every game," Matthew Espinola said.
Another neighbor, Tricia Fitzgerald, was walking on the sidewalk near the officer's home, crying. She said the officer's wife bought him a Harley-Davidson motorcycle last Christmas.
Gina Flisk said his sons walked his Harley down the street on Christmas day for him last year.
Asked how she would remember him, she said, "You picture him on his motorcycle on a warm day."
She said he and his wife were very supportive of each other. "They're the couple, in my opinion, that you wanted to be like" Gina Flisk said. "They're the family that you wanted to be like. They were a good balance."
The other victim, Peters, had recently been working at AT&T after serving as a CHA police officer. He was in the U.S. Army and attended Chicago Vocational Academy High School.
Reed said her brother loved cars.
Neighbors on the block where Peters and Flisk were killed said it has been plagued with violence.
Johnny Walker said someone tried to steal his truck from of his garage recently. He said there's been a lot of burglaries around his home for the last several months.
"It's bad. It's dangerous. Breaking into houses, that's all they want to do," said Walker, 67, "Everyday, somebody's breaking in."
Walker said shootings are also common. "In the summer," he said, "you couldn't sit out front."
The Chicago Police Memorial Foundation is offering the $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the killer or killers.
Police said anyone with information should call Calumet Area detectives at 312-747-8272, or place a confidential toll-free call to 888-976-7468.
