Gabriel Patton and Rafael Wordlaw were running late the day they met on the first day of their training with the Cook County sheriff’s office in February 2020.
When Patton’s bag of uniform clothes burst open, dumping shirts and pants to the floor, Wordlaw stopped to help him collect his things, and a friendship between the men was born.
The men bonded over their work, particularly in the early days of the pandemic. Patton, now a sheriff’s deputy, described his friend and colleague Wordlaw, who was fatally shot in an apparent armed robbery early Tuesday, as genuine and hardworking.
“It’s like I lost a brother,” said, Patton, 38.
Patton was among dozens of people who gathered in Fuller Park on the South Side Wednesday afternoon with red balloons to remember Wordlaw on the same day that Chicago police said they were questioning a person in the deputy’s shooting death.
Trendale Roberson, another colleague of Wordlaw’s, said they’d met on the first day of training and realized that they were both from the Englewood neighborhood on the South Side.
“To see a young Black man who made it out of what some people would call the hood, who graduated high school and graduated college, to lose his life to senseless violence — it hurts,” he said.
Roberson, Patton and others said they’d last seen Wordlaw just Thursday. “If I’d known it was going to be our last conversation, I would have told him I loved him,” Roberson said. “He always said the city was going to know his name. I just hate that it came this way.”
Hours before the gathering, Chicago police said a person was in custody and being questioned.
Shortly before 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, Wordlaw was off-duty at a gas station in the 500 block of East 67th Street when he was approached by someone, and an argument ensued. The person he was arguing with pulled out a handgun and opened fire before fleeing on foot, police said.
Authorities said it appeared that Wordlaw was the target of an attempted robbery.
Later, when friends and family gathered on the park’s baseball diamond to let go of the balloons, Wordlaw’s aunt, Rosie Henry, spoke of holding onto her faith as her family navigated the loss.
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Rafael “had a vision and a dream,” she said. “Humble spirit, kept peace around himself and anyone he came into contact with.”