The alderman in whose ward the policeman was shot and killed with his own gun yesterday feels “sad” about it.
“I don’t know what to say. It just makes me sad,” said Ald. JoAnn Thompson, 16th, whose ward covers the area around the station. “That one individual does not speak for this whole ward. And I know there’s a lot of crime, but there’s still a lot of good people here, too.”
Not as sad as when a relative — father of her granddaughter’s children — was found in a van (not in her ward) 11 months ago:
Police discovered [Wilfredo] Gines’ body in the back of his Ford Expedition on Saturday night in a college neighborhood in Hammond, Ind., three days after he left his home in the Chicago Lawn neighborhood on the city’s South Side.
Family said Gines, 31, a relative of Chicago Ald. JoAnn Thompson (16th), was going to confront two men he suspected of stealing a car engine he had rebuilt in an auto garage in Chicago Heights.
She has a right to feel sad, but she also has a right to be pissed off — and dying for something that might reduce even a little the rampant antisocial behavior of her constituents.
Blithe Spirit 