The deaths Monday night of the two officers, Conrad Gary and Eduardo Marmolejo, were the latest in a series of losses for the Chicago Police Department in 2018 — a year Eddie Johnson, the police superintendent, described as “immensely difficult” during an emotional news conference.
Last month, Officer Samuel Jimenez, who had joined the department last year and had recently finished his probationary period, was shot and killed after a man opened fire in a hospital. And in February, a Chicago police commander, Paul R. Bauer, was shot and killed during a confrontation with a man on a busy downtown workday, not far from City Hall.
Gary and Marmolejo were killed instantly Monday evening, authorities said, after they were hit by a passenger train on the city’s far South Side. The officers, who were working as partners, were answering a report of gunshots after the city’s ShotSpotter technology detected the gunfire.
When they arrived near where the sounds had been detected, they saw someone with a gun and gave chase. As they ran near tracks, a train passed through at speeds of 60 or 70 mph, according to Johnson.
A weapon was found and a person of interest was being questioned in the case, Anthony Guglielmi, a police spokesman, said on Twitter.
Gary and Marmolejo, both in their 30s, were relatively new to the police force and both, officials said, had young children. Gary had been on the job for 18 months, and Marmolejo for 2 1/2 years.
Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s mayor, said residents needed to recognize the difficulty of the moment for police officers. “As we go about our time with our families, let us remind ourselves that there are others who cannot,” Emanuel said. “I think it’s really important that we put our arms around the Chicago Police Department and hold them up and support them at this critical juncture.”
The department has long wrestled with other problems, including street violence and distrust from the city’s residents, particularly over officers’ conduct toward black residents.
This year, reports of violent crimes have decreased, but bloodshed from gun violence remains an entrenched problem in the city. As of the start of December, homicides and shootings in Chicago were significantly down in 2018 from the same time last year. Still, over a single summer weekend, 66 people were shot, and 12 of them died.
This fall, Jason Van Dyke, a white Chicago police officer, was convicted of second-degree murder in the shooting of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager whose death was captured on a video that horrified many Chicagoans. Three other Chicago police officers are now waiting for a judge to decide whether they will be convicted of conspiracy, official misconduct and obstruction of justice for the stories they told, backing up Van Dyke, after the shooting.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.