When Albany Park District Police Officer James Valenzano and his partner, Josephine Rivera, ran into a burning Northwest Side building to save three children, the last thing on his mind was getting injured.
“You kind of do what you got to do. You think about it (getting hurt) later,” Valenzano said Thursday.
Valenzano and Rivera were on patrol Wednesday night when they heard a radio call about children trapped in a smoke-filled two-story apartment in the 3900 block of West Montrose Avenue.
The officers, who were in the vicinity, ran into the building and encountered a woman on the first floor who said three children were trapped upstairs.
Valenzano and Rivera then went through the back door to the second-floor kitchen before finding a 6-year-old girl and two boys, ages 3 and 1, in a bedroom. All were crying, Valenzano said.
The two officers were able to carry the children out of the building before firefighters arrived and extinguished the blaze.
The children, who police believe are siblings, were taken to an area hospital but did not sustain any injuries, said Fire Department spokesman Will Knight.
Albany Park District Lt. Cindy Pontoriero said she will recommend that Valenzano, 45, and Rivera, 31, receive the department’s Life Saving Award.
Both officers, who are parents, put their lives on the line without thinking of their own families, Pontoriero said. “They don’t think of their own personal safety, and they do things on instinct, and fortunately they were able to save these babies from smoke inhalation or worse,” she said.
When Valenzano and Rivera receive their Life Saving Awards, they will join a special group of city employees who have put themselves on the line to protect the lives of others.
Chicago Police Officer Michael Fryer and his partner, Officer Michael Rivera, who is not related to Josephine Rivera, were a block away from a business that had been robbed at gunpoint when they saw a man who matched the description of the suspect.
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After taking the suspect to the business that had been robbed, where he was identified, Fryer, Michael Rivera and Officer Richard Jeschke questioned him. They then learned the name of his accomplice and discovered that the men had been responsible for 10 armed robberies of dry cleaners in the Albany Park and Jefferson Park Police Districts that began in 1997, Fryer said.
Fryer, a former photographer for the Tribune who has been a police officer for three years, Michael Rivera and Jeschke were among more than 90 officers who received commendations and awards from Police Supt. Terry Hillard on Wednesday at the Chicago Police Education & Training Academy, 1300 W. Jackson Blvd.
“We heard he had taken a lot of change in the robbery and when we did a protective pat-down search, his pants were jingling like a Salvation Army pot,” Fryer said of the man he arrested in 1998. “He said he’d just broken a piggy bank.”
The man told the officers he had robbed the same dry cleaners three times and he was apparently so confident, he only ran one block to escape, Fryer said.
Also honored in the ceremony were Wentworth District Officers John Adams, Daniel Gomez, Ethel Green, Amina Greer and Jacqueline Roberson, who in August 1998 comforted mortally wounded Officer Michael Ceriale in the minutes after he had been shot, got a description of the suspects and kept Ceriale alert, police said.
Greer said she and Green spotted one of the suspects as they performed crowd-control duties and pointed him out to detectives, who arrested him.
“It feels good,” Greer, an officer in her fourth year, said of the commendation.