By Lauren Zumbach and Duaa Eldeib
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — Of all the dangers police face on the job, experts say suicide can be a surprisingly common killer. Fox Lake police Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz, though, was far from typical when he staged his own death to look like a homicide.
Gliniewicz, 52, shot himself because he feared that his history of criminal activity was about to be revealed by a new city administrator who demanded a review of department finances and practices, according to investigators from the Lake County Major Crime Task Force.
Before taking his life Sept. 1 and prompting a massive manhunt for three fictional suspects, Gliniewicz stole thousands of dollars from the village’s Explorer youth police training program, authorities said. Gliniewicz, who ran the program and whose thefts date back at least seven years, used the money for personal expenses, including mortgage payments, travel and adult websites, task force commander George Filenko said Wednesday.
Newly released information portrays Gliniewicz in even more sinister ways. Village officials released hundreds of pages of his personnel records late Thursday that, along with other records, paint a portrait of an officer who sent texts that appeared to threaten the village administrator, was suspended for engaging in sex acts with a subordinate who later sued the village and was accused of other misconduct on the job, including making threats to a dispatcher.
Police officers may be more at risk of turning to suicide when faced with a scandal than the average person, experts said.
“The disgrace to the badge, to their family, to their fellow law enforcement officers, those are big factors,” said Richard Beary, former president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and police chief at the University of Central Florida.
But Beary stressed that Gliniewicz’s case was “so far out of the norm it was mind-boggling.”
In 38 years, he said, he’s never seen an officer attempt to make a suicide look like a murder, and certainly not in the planned, methodical way Gliniewicz apparently did.
But the Fox Lake lieutenant is not the first public employee in the Chicago area who has chosen to take his own life rather than face consequences of alleged misdeeds.
In one of the most public suicides in recent years, Metra Executive Director Phil Pagano, 60, stepped in front of a Metra train in 2010 on the day he was poised to be fired for taking $475,000 of unauthorized vacation pay and forging documents to cover it up. A lawyer for Pagano’s widow later said that the longtime Metra chief was supporting two other households in addition to his own.
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