On a hot August morning around 3 a.m. during his routine patrol in 1987, Riverside Police Chief Tom Weitzel was shot.
Weitzel kept the story and its memory for 36 years.
“When you’re working, you don’t want to dwell on that, and I didn’t want that to define my career,” he said.
But Weitzel, now retired, is no longer working. And it was time to share.
Weitzel decided to share it with the public in the National Law Enforcement Museum’s Precinct 444 podcast and to release the radio tapes from the time when the table were turned on him and he became the victim.
“I have just come to grips with it,” he said.
Weitzel spoke with the Landmark about his experience.
At the time, Weitzel, who is now an ambassador for the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, had been on the job for just three years and was newly married.
He explained he knew since he was four years old that he wanted to be a police officer. It’s in the family. His uncle, also a man in blue, used to take him on ride alongs or let him sit at the dispatch center. His three sons are police officers, too.
According to Weitzel, on the night of the shooting, he was on a routine solo patrol when he noticed a suspicious car without license plates that had heavily tinted windows. It was parked on the wrong side of the street.
Weitzel used a flashlight to see what was going on inside, but several layers of tint and lack of light in the area prevented him from seeing inside.
“They had to put a lot of extra film on the window because my spotlight just bounced right off the car,” he said.
He recalled that when he walked out in front of his car and behind the parked car, the back door opened and a man, dressed in all black, rolled out onto the ground.
“I heard the shotgun rack — that’s a very distinctive sound when you hear the pump. Those types of guns are typically used for hunting,” Weitzel said. “The next thing I know, he shot me.”
Weitzel said the impact from the bullets lifted him off the ground and he fell, hitting his head on the bumper. He said was unconscious for about 35 seconds.
Later, police learned that the shooter used birdshot pellets, small lead spheres used in shotgun ammunition to spread out in a pattern after they’re fired.
When Weitzel regained consciousness, he saw two more people getting into the car and fleeing the scene.
He tried to call for help, but his portable police radio was damaged from the impact, so he crawled back to his car to use the radio inside. That part of the recording can be heard on the radio tape.
Police appeared within minutes. Weitzel said he was rushed to the Loyola emergency room where they found out that he had broken ribs, internal bleeding, and an eye injury from the shrapnel. But most of the impact was on the bulletproof vest.
“I could feel that there was blood leaking into my stomach, I could feel the broken ribs and I could feel the eye injury,” Weitzel said. “But I felt lucky to be alive.”
The head of the emergency room told Weitzel and his wife that when they got a call about a police officer getting shot in the chest with a shotgun, she expected him to be dead on arrival.
“She was amazed that I was alive,” Weitzel said.
Police later determined those three people were part of a Chicago street gang who had been attempting to commit an armed robbery in Riverside. But after they shot Weitzel, they fled the scene instead.
Weitzel returned to work six weeks later. His wife was against him returning yet supported his decision.
“She would have made me quit,” Weitzel said. “She went through hell. Imagine a police chief knocking on her door at 4 a.m. telling you ‘your husband’s been shot, I don’t know if he’s alive or dead. I need you to come with me to the hospital.’”
The suspects were not caught at the time.
But about eight later, one of the people from that night was arrested for weapons trafficking. He was facing 20 years in prison. To cut his sentence, he offered police information about what he said was an officer killed in a Western suburb.
Police could not find a record of a deceased policeman that matched the description. Eventually, they connected it to Weitzel’s shooting.
Although the offender was apprehended, he could not be prosecuted for shooting because the statute of limitations in the 1980s was seven years for the attempted murder of a policeman.
“That was very heartbreaking to me that we could not prosecute the offenders,” Weitzel said.
However, Weitzel did not give up and collaborated with the late Republican State Senator and Riverside resident, Judy Baar Topinka, to abolish the statute of limitations in the 1990s.
“I try not to think about it anymore, I did what I could by getting the law changed, I was proud of that,” Weitzel said. “In order to continue to work, you have to find a place [where] anger isn’t there.”
The La Grange Area League of Women Voters invited Weitzel to speak Jan. 18 at the Brookfield Public Library about the Safety, Accountability, Fairness and Equity Today Act, or SAFE-T Act. The law eliminated monetary bail in September and includes other provisions.