With everything in his life coming together, Thomas Dalof went out Friday night to celebrate with a couple of friends. He had just been accepted into the Chicago Fire Department academy and had landed a job with the local stagehands union.
“He called me and said, ‘Everything is going great. Dad, I’m really happy because everything is great right now and I have everything in front of me,'” his father, Harry, said, before he began sobbing.
Thomas Dalof, 26, of Chicago was killed Saturday morning in a hit-and-run crash in the 6200 block of North Lakewood Avenue in the Edgewater neighborhood.
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Boubacar Bah, 24, a delivery driver, was being held in lieu of $2 million bail Sunday on charges of reckless homicide and leaving the scene of a crash.
“At 2 o’clock in the morning, a doctor from Evanston calls us,” said Dalof’s mother, Mary Beth. “He told us that Tom was in an accident and at the hospital and that he didn’t make it.
“Well, we understood ‘hospital’ and we understood ‘accident.’ But for him to say that he didn’t make it was too overwhelming.”
Dalof of the 5600 block of North Campbell Avenue was a senior at Northeastern Illinois University. He was studying business and was looking forward to starting the next phase of his life, his parents said. They last saw him Wednesday, when he tried on a new suit for them.
“I said, ‘Tom this is a beautiful suit. You could get married in that suit,'” his father said.
“He looked so good,” his mother said. “He was a good-hearted, strong, healthy person.”
His parents, who live in Huntley, said their son and his friends were leaving a bar Friday when they spotted two men kicking a woman’s car. The woman got out of the car and confronted the men, they said. Their son jumped in to save her, they said.
“They were beating on her [the way] they would beat a man,” his father said. “It was Tom who got the guys off her.”
Dalof and a friend “extricated” themselves from the fight and ran toward Dalof’s car, said Assistant State’s Atty. Todd Dombrowski said.
Bah allegedly ran through the stop sign at Lakewood and Granville Avenues and hit Dalof, law-enforcement authorities said (this sentence as published has been corrected in this text). Bah later told police that he had been drinking and smoking marijuana earlier that night.
Dalof was pronounced dead at 2:28 a.m. Saturday in St. Francis Hospital in Evanston.
“He had a close group of friends, of buddies, from grammar school,” his dad said. “They were all there for him at the hospital.”
Bah, who is a native of Guinea and has lived in the U.S. for six years, fled after he hit an unknown object, said his public defender, Arthur Willis. Bah went back a little later, but saw police and fled again. He smashed into a light pole and abandoned his car, a 1994 Buick Skylark, which police later found, authorities said.
Bah later turned himself in, police said.
Dalof’s parents said their son, who loved salmon fishing with his father, donated his organs.
“Tommy was the sensible one. He’s the one who had the head on his shoulders. He gave all his parts to donors,” his mother said.
She said he died doing what he wanted to do with his life.
“He was helping other people.”
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