It was an early fall evening in Chicago when police officers John Conneely and Mike Modzelewski heard the call of shots fired over their radio while doing their rounds.
This wasn’t news for them anymore. Partner for many years now, they had responded to dozens of shootings together on the city’s violence-plagued south side.
But what they found that night was far from the commonplace.
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“It was very chaotic,” Conneely told reporters. “When we first arrived, there had to be about a hundred people out on the street, screaming, crying, people yelling. We had a person shot over here, we had a person shot over there, we had another person shot over here.”
When a woman came running up to them holding the baby, Modzelewski knew right away that the baby had been shot.
“It’s an unreal situation. Borderline helplessness,” the 11-year Chicago police veteran said. “You’re not quite sure what to do. You want to take action, some kind of action simply because it is a child, and that’s pretty much what we did.”
Protocol dictates that they should report the incident and wait for an ambulance to arrive at the scene of the crime.
But the officers broke department policy and rushed the baby to the hospital themselves in their squad car.
Saving lives
“The first thing I did when I got in the car was get on the radio to a firehouse that I knew we were going to pass to see if there was an ambulance in quarters, and when the dispatcher got back to me and said there wasn’t, that’s when we made the decision to keep going,” Conneely said.
Princeton’s mother and grandmother, among the five people shot, did not survive. But thanks to the officers’ astute judgment, Princeton did.
“They made a decision, and honestly it goes against protocol to remove a victim from a scene unless it’s a dire circumstance,” a supervisor said. “As it turns out it probably saved a life.”
The police may be getting some bad rap recently, with the recent surge of police brutality incidents. But there are still good people in the police force who simply want to save lives and not abuse their power.
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