The wife of suspected bank robber Jeffrey Erickson shot herself to death last December after being cornered by police and federal agents, authorities said Wednesday.
The Cook County Medical Examiner`s Office has determined that Jill Sandra Erickson, 27, committed suicide, said Roy Dames, the office`s executive director.
”She had a contact wound to the head and it left an impression of the gun,” Dames said. That impression ”matched perfectly,” the six-shot revolver with five unused rounds found in Erickson`s possession, Dames said.
The finding comes more than two months after the Hanover Park woman led a wild 11-mile chase and exchanged gunfire with authorities before they surrounded the vehicle in the parking area of a subdivision. Police found Erickson wounded in the back of her van. She died later that day.
Her husband had been arrested earlier at a Schaumburg shopping center by federal agents, who swarmed around him as he entered a car.
Erickson has been indicted on federal charges of robbing eight area financial institutions and on state charges of attempted first-degree murder in the shooting of a Palatine police officer. He faces a maximum of 315 years in prison on the federal counts and a maximum sentence of 60 years on the state charge.
FBI agents staked out the car, a stolen Mazda, because it was the same type of automobile a robber had been stealing to use as getaway cars. Erickson, a former Hoffman Estates police trainee, allegedly reached for a bag containing loaded guns when the officers surrounded him.
As a result of those actions, Erickson was initially charged with armed violence, possession of a stolen vehicle and one bank robbery count.
After seeing her husband arrested, Jill Erickson sped away in the couple`s van and fired several shots at her pursuers, striking several of their vehicles, police say. Police returned fire, apparently shattering the van`s windshield.
They finally cornered the van in a residential subdivision. When Erickson did not respond to demands that she exit the van, police opened the door and found her mortally wounded.
Erickson was taken immediately to Humana Hospital in Hoffman Estates, where she died.
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Authorities said then that her death appeared to have been the result of multiple gunshot wounds. But federal agents, who said they thought they had heard a shot from inside the van just before opening the door, suspected that Erickson might have shot herself, said FBI spokesman Robert Long.
”When they approached the van, they thought they heard a muffled gunshot, but at the time they couldn`t say beyond a shadow of a doubt,” Long said.
Erickson was hit by bullets twice, Dames said, but the shot that may have been fired by law enforcement officers was only a graze and not enough to kill her.
”That has nothing to do with the cause of death,” Dames said.
Authorities have found Jill Erickson`s suicide as puzzling as her apparent participation in her husband`s alleged bank heists.
”I don`t know if she or her husband talked about what they should do if they ever got caught,” Long said. ”We don`t even know why she got involved in the bank robberies. We just don`t know.”