Photo: Lou Jogmen Jr.Lou Jogmen Jr. still has the gun that nearly ended his father’s life.
He also has the handcuffs his father was forced to wear during the shooting as well as photos and newspaper clippings from the fateful night his dad perhaps saved a woman’s life by offering to risk his own in her place.
“That gun is the nexus between who he was and who he became,” Jogmen Jr. said.
In the summer of 1977, movie fans were heralding the release of “Star Wars.” Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours” album topped the charts. And the Cubs, once again, looked promising.
Back then, Tinley Park was a sleepy village, about half its current size and with half its current population. The post office was new; so was the Jewel grocery store. Andrew High School was getting ready to accept its first class of freshmen and sophomores.
A lot has changed since then. Yet, to this day, in pockets where long-timers live, people still remember a single event above others: The night Patrolman Lou Jogmen Sr. traded places with a hostage and became Tinley Park’s first and only police officer to be shot in the line of duty.
“It was the talk of the town,” said Pat Siemsen, whose parents lived next door to the Jogmens on New England Avenue. “At the time, Tinley was your typical small town. Everybody kind of knew each other. Not much was going on. I definitely remember the shock of that night.”
Though memories of the incident still send shivers down the spines of police officers and residents, the Jogmen family have strived all these years to pluck the positives from the devastation.
“It means a lot to us that people still remember,” said Jogmen Jr., today a commander with the Park Ridge Police Department. “We still live it. Even now, 34 years later, it’s still raw.”
Officer down
Jogmen Sr., then 35, was working the night shift on July 12, 1977. He was about to go home for the spaghetti lunch his wife Mary had waiting for him when a call came in about a robbery at the 7-Eleven store in the Brementowne Mini Mall on 159th Street and 76th Avenue.
Back then, the police department was small, maybe a dozen officers. Jogmen Jr. remembers his dad patrolling in the family car for a while. His uniform often consisted of a police shirt and blue jeans.
Jogmen Sr. was the first officer on the scene that night. He encountered a gunman, 19-year-old Donald Villa, exiting the store with a female hostage, a woman whom Jogmen thought appeared to be pregnant. Villa threatened to shoot the woman if Jogmen didn’t relinquish his gun.
In a move that has become legendary across the Southland, the father of three exchanged places with the hostage. Jogmen dropped his gun. Villa then handcuffed the officer and held him face down on the pavement with two guns on him, one of them Jogmen’s.
Other officers on the scene, including Al Bechtel and Dave Peterson, testified that they heard Villa repeatedly curse at Jogmen, calling him a “pig” and threatening to “blow his head off.”
“The last thing he asked my dad was, ‘Do you have a baby?’ ” Jogmen Jr. said.
Jogmen Sr. did.
“And then he shot him,” Jogmen Jr. said.
Villa reportedly fired one round from Jogmen’s gun into the officer’s head. Bechtel then shot Villa, crippling him. Villa was sentenced to 30 to 90 years in prison for two charges of attempted murder and one charge of armed robbery and has since died.
Amazingly, Jogmen survived the shooting. But his life and the community were forever changed.
Family tragedy
Jogmen Jr. remembers waking up the morning of the 13th to chaos. People were in his house, cars were parked up and down the street.
“My mom was gone and my aunt was over,” he said. “I knew something was wrong.”
He had just turned 7. His sister Jennifer was 8, and the family had celebrated baby Joseph’s first birthday just days before.
Jogmen Jr. has sketchy memories of people telling him his dad had been shot and was in a coma. He recalls months of hospital visits.
“He looked terrible, all bandaged up,” he said. “That is not how you want to see your dad.”
People who knew Jogmen Sr. say he was a big, imposing kind of fellow, almost made to be a cop. He’d served with the Marines in the 1960s and he had a penchant for doing the right thing.
In the ensuing months, Jogmen would recover enough to walk and drive again. He even served as coach on the police department’s softball team, the Choirboys.
His speech, however, remained slower, more deliberate.
Jogmen Jr. said his parents were determined to not let Villa change their lives any more than he already had.
“My dad and I used to take long walks after dinner almost every night,” Jogmen Jr. said.
During those strolls, Jogmen Sr. would encourage his son and impart values. He also assured Jogmen Jr. that despite the tragic results of his decision that night, he would do it again.
“My dad was a very righteous man. He truly believed in doing the right thing,” Jogmen Jr. said. “To the end, he believed he did. And so do I.”
On Easter in 1986, Jogmen Sr. developed a case of the hiccups that would not go away. Soon after, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, something the family suspects was a side effect of his 14 surgeries.
He died on Father’s Day that year.
Mary Jogmen did her best to stay the course, Jogmen Jr. said.
“My mom still stayed home with us even though money was tight,” he said. “She was determined to not let Villa change the way she raised her children.”
Even though he knew since he was a small child that he wanted to follow in his dad’s footsteps and become a police officer, Jogmen Jr. said he earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree.
“It was important to my dad that we have a backup plan, so it was important to me,” he said. “My dad always wanted us to go to college, something he didn’t do.”
The family stayed in Tinley Park until all three kids finished school. Jennifer attended Mount Assisi High School in Lemont, while Jogmen Jr. and Joe went to Andrew. All three of the Jogmen children went on to graduate from the University of Illinois.
Today, Jogmen Jr. is married. He and his wife Mindy have four children. Jennifer is married and lives in Arizona with her husband and three children. Joe works in information technology. He and his wife live in the western suburbs and just welcomed their first child.
Jogmen Jr. keeps a photo of his dad on his desk at the Park Ridge Police Department. He also holds near his father’s favorite quote, by William Penn: “Right is right, even if everyone is against it; and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.”
The fickleness of fate
“People say an officer should never give up his own gun,” Jogmen Jr. said. “But you have to live with yourself. Afterward, my dad told me he wouldn’t have been able to live with himself had a pregnant woman been killed, especially knowing he had a chance to save her.”
Turns out, Gwenda Sangren was not pregnant. Villa had shoved a bag of money that he’d stolen from the store into her slacks.
But if fate conspired against Jogmen Sr. that night, it also had worked in his favor as far as his surviving the tragedy. A few months before the shooting, Tinley Park officers were told to start carrying less powerful guns. And back then, Jogmen Sr. made several of his own rounds. One of those rounds, less potent than a factory round, ended up lodged in his brain that night.
Had Jogmen Sr. been shot with the handgun he’d carried prior to that change, and with a manufactured bullet, he likely would not have survived, Jogmen Jr. said.
Friend and inspiration
Rick Bruno was hired by the Tinley Park Police Department a month after the shooting.
“There was a cloud over the department then; it was very subdued,” said Bruno, who recently retired from the force.
Though he didn’t know Jogmen Sr. before the shooting, he got to know him very well afterward.
“He’s my hero, absolutely,” Bruno said.
“It’s been reported that Lou was taken hostage that night. Nobody took Lou hostage. Lou gave himself up. He knew fully well what he was getting into,” Bruno said. “That was raw courage.”
Bruno recalls an evening, months after the shooting, when he and Peterson picked up Jogmen and headed to the Bremen House bar for some drinks and camaraderie. At one point in the conversation, Jogmen turned to Peterson and asked him to tell him what happened the night of July 12.
“He wanted to know if he’d screwed up,” Bruno said. “I just took it all in. It was a lesson for me, that you might have to be ready to give up your life for somebody else. I don’t think anybody knows how they’ll react until they’re in that situation.”
Bruno said the impression he got was that Jogmen would have done it all again.
Since then, however, others have speculated whether or not an officer should relinquish his weapon.
“Now, in training, they say never give up your weapon, but the trainers weren’t there that day. Lou was there that day,” Bruno said.
Patrick Siemsen, assistant commander for the Homewood Police Department and training director for the South Suburban Emergency Response Team, talks about the Jogmen case in a class on hostage rescue. His mother is the woman whose parents lived next door to the Jogmens.
“Those situations are delicate and dangerous and can easily go bad,” Siemsen said. “We now know that relinquishing your gun increases the offender’s power.”
The void
Jogmen Jr. continues to point to the silver lining that outlines this tragic story.
“I try to focus on the positive,” he said.
Among those pluses has been the undying support of the community. Bruno said sign-up sheets to cut the grass or paint the house or cook meals for the Jogmens always were full. Officers regularly drove Mary and the kids to the hospital to visit Jogmen.
Jogmen Jr. said members of the force continue to check in on his mom.
A newspaper headline at the time summed things up nicely, Bruno said: “Tinley Park cops take care of their own.”
“We really were a family,” he said. “It made the job more meaningful.”
Bruno now worries that events and lessons of that night will be forgotten.
“People need to be reminded of sacrifices police make,” he said. “That’s just as important as news about police corruption.”
Jogmen Jr. said that, on the one hand, he was able to spend a lot of time with his dad after the shooting. While other fathers were away at work, Lou and his dad were hanging out.
He’s also grateful for the relationship he developed with many members of the police force. And he’s appreciative that his dad’s name lives on through a police training facility in the station at 7850 W. 183rd St. and a park named for him.
Mostly, though, he said he’s grateful for the inspiration his father provided.
“I do believe I am who I am today because of my father,” he said. “But would I have liked for him to be at my graduation, at my wedding? Would I have liked for him to have walked my sister down the aisle? Would I have liked for him to get to know his son Joe?
“Absolutely.”
