Search for Suspect Continues After Road Rage Shooting Wounds Off-Duty CPD Officer

Police were still searching for a suspected gunman hours after a road rage shooting wounded an off-duty Chicago officer in the city’s Irving Park neighborhood Tuesday afternoon, leading to a massive search that shut down numerous intersections during rush hour. Police said the shooting started after the driver of a black SUV “abruptly stopped,” causing the 27-year-old officer to rear end them just after 3 p.m. near the intersection of West Addison Street and North Elston Avenue. Details about what happened next, however, remain unclear, though the officer was ultimately struck in the face by gunfire and the driver of the SUV fled the scene. The officer was rushed to Illinois Masonic Medical Center where her injuries were described as “serious but not life-threatening.” The shooting sparked a massive police search in Hollywood Park, with K-9 units on the ground and officers searching between homes in a hunt for a suspect in the shooting, according to NBC’s Sky 5 helicopter crew at the time. Police taped off a large swath of street in the area around the site of the initial shooting, and Elston was closed in both directions between Addison and Kimball as police investigated. A second scene was also reported by police near Lawrence Avenue and the Kennedy Expressway, where both the entrance and exit ramps onto the outbound side of the highway were closed as part of the investigation. There, police reportedly attempted to stop a vehicle in connection with the shooting. That vehicle ultimately struck two squad cars as at least one officer fired shots. No injuries were reported, however. The vehicle was later found abandoned as authorities continued their search for the driver, though no official suspect information has been made immediately available. Chicago Police Supt. David Brown spoke to the frequency of road rage incidents in Chicago and how access to firearms has escalated violence. “We’ve had other regular residents of this city either beat up or assaulted during a road rage, but also we’ve seen gunplay in road rage incidents here. And really everywhere across this country, personal conflicts have ended more and more with escalating violence,” Brown said. Chicago was recently the site of a deadly road rage incident when a 36-year-old man was fatally stabbed during an altercation in the city’s River North neighborhood in the early evening of Aug. 23. In July, a 24-year-old woman was critically injured after she was shot six times in a road rage incident on I-57 near Vollmer Road in the south suburbs.

Google, News