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CHICAGO — A woman was shot and killed and an off-duty Chicago police officer critically wounded early Wednesday morning in what police said appeared to be a robbery gone bad on Chicago’s West Side.
About 1:30 a.m., Wood District police officers responded to a call of gunfire in the 3000 block of West Franklin Boulevard, near the woman’s home. There they found both the officer, a 23-year department veteran and a detective in the bomb and arson section, and the woman, a supervisor for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, shot in the officer’s personal sport-utility vehicle. The officer was in the driver’s seat.
A neighbor near the scene of the crime heard the officer say, “I’m dying. Someone call an ambulance. I’m dying.”
Chicago Police Supt. Jody Weis, said the crime “appears to be an attempted robbery.”
The woman was identified as Kathryn Romberg, 45, of the 3000 block of West Franklin, according to a spokesman for the Cook County medical examiner’s office. She was dead at the scene. Romberg was a 13-year employee of DCFS and was supervisor for the division of child protection, according to a DCFS spokesman.
The officer and the woman had been arguing in the car, so loudly that a neighbor called police about midnight to complain, said Sue Naiden, who lives in the same condominium building that Romberg did. Police came, apparently talked to the couple, and left, she said.
Later, “I was sleeping,” she said. “I heard some gunfire, and my dogs were going crazy.” She said she heard three shots.
Neighbors then heard the sound of a blaring car horn, Naiden said, adding that she saw the woman slumped over in the front seat and the man sitting erect.
Romberg lived with her daughter, whom Naiden described as being in her early 20s. She said Romberg had lived in the condo building for nearly 3 years.
The officer, who was shot multiple times, was at Mt. Sinai Hospital in critical condition, officials said.
This morning’s shooting marked the second time in a little more than a month that a Chicago police officer was shot.
On July 2, Belmont District Officer Richard M. Francis, 60, was shot and killed by a woman who wrestled his gun from him while checking out a disturbance at a CTA bus at Belmont and Western Avenues, outside Belmont Area police headquarters.
It’s also the second recent incident where an off-duty Chicago police officer was shot in what was thought to be a robbery. In February 2007, Officer Jose Vazquez, 34, was found fatally shot in an apparent robbery in a gated area behind his West Side condominium in the 2500 block of West Harrison Street. He was returning from work as a security guard for a gas company. No one has been charged in that case.
Copyright 2008 The Chicago Tribune