Cook County Sheriff’s Police Officer Eugene Butler admits “the hair on the back of my neck came up” when a long freight train rumbled under him at the scene of a potential suicide Saturday.
In order to keep a man on his perch on the Illinois Route 394 overpass, “I kept him focused on me and not the train,” the 20-year law enforcement veteran recalled Wednesday, stressing fellow officers were key to the successful conclusion to the real-life drama.
He was driving through nearby Glenwood with a trainee at 10:25 p.m. Saturday when a call came over the radio about a potential suicide on Route 394 near Sauk Village.
Butler, a hostage negotiator since 2015 who had just competed a crisis intervention course and had recently responded to incidents in Crestwood and Dixmoor, said he headed over to “do traffic control, or whatever.”
He arrived at the scene between Route 30 and Sauk Trail to find Sheriff’s Police Officers Joe Phillips and Kevin Walsh talking to a “crying and intoxicated” man sitting above the railroad track.
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Butler said Phillips and Walsh “did an excellent job” in their initial contacts before turning the distraught man over to him.
Building on his colleagues’ efforts, Butler worked to get the man “to calm down, and get him away from the edge.”
The man, a 40-year-old Park Forest resident, said his wife had left him.
Butler got her on the phone.
But there was no way he was going to grant the man’s request to bring her to the scene. There’s always the possibility, he explained, that a potential jumper, “might want the person there to witness the suicide.
“I was able to get him to believe she would meet him at the hospital. Then I told him, ‘OK, I kept my word. Now I need you to keep your word.'”
Butler said getting the man off the edge of the busy four-lane expressway, and persuading him to be transported to the hospital for treatment was a team effort.
Butler credited Lt. Michael Goldsmith, Sgt. Matthew Gena, Sgt. Christopher Olejarz and officers Rob Waller, Harry Vance, Christie Urso, Tommie Hall and Sam Suffern with helping to stabilize the surrounding noise and movement from cars and trains — only one train came through.
“Yes, it was me out there, but they allowed me to do my job,” Butler said. “It wasn’t just me out there.”
Dennis Sullivan is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.