The last fatal shooting caused by police to take place in in the actual town of Normal was in 2002, 19 years ago. On I-55 there was a fatal shooting known as the “I-55 Shooting” and this shooting involved Normal PD, State Police and McLean County, this was the last fatal shooting and took place in January 2009.
Chad Wallace, founder and Executive Director of Team Blue Line, works with fallen officers, families of fallen officers and injured officers. Wallace works with officers who suffer from PTSD. According to Wallace and recent studies, if you’ve served in law enforcement for over five years, then you have PTSD.
“That’s still not something that is widely tackled in the law enforcement community,” said Wallace.
Wallace said he works with lots of officers who have discharged their weapons in the line of duty. Wallace served in a local Sheriff’s office based in Atlanta for 15 years, but is taking an early retirement to dedicate time to Team Blue Line.
“I was never involved in a officer-shooting, there were many close situations, but thankfully I never had to discharge my weapon in the line of duty. Now in helping and dealing with officers, I’ve had close friends that have had to go through the mental stress of that. And as anything in life, everybody handles a situation differently. The stress of taking someone’s life is not a easy thing,” said Wallace. “The guys that I personally know, it took them a long time. It took some counseling to have to work through this. To work through the fact that they had to take someone’s life in the line of duty it, and it was the right thing to do.”
Wallace said there’s a use of force policy with every department. Wallace said there are steps that escalate up and down and according to the use-of-force policies and the situation’s going on, that’s where the decision to discharge a firearm comes from.
“They had to engage the suspect,” said Wallace. “That’s just a hard and difficult situation. I mean you’re responding to the loss of life. You’re responding to a chaotic situation. You’re responding to the possibility of shots being fired at you, and you’re looking for someone that’s already killed handful of people.”
When there’s an officer-involved shooting in the state of Georgia, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation will step in and take over the investigation, and take it off the department’s hands.
“I’m guessing that ISP does the same thing. It’s just taking that investigation away from the department, not in a bad way, but just helping them, helping with resources that they probably have a lot of and just, I would assume to just give a clean, fresh look at it…away from the department. It’s just giving fresh eyes to the investigation,” said Wallace.
