Mother of boy, 13, killed by cop in wreck tells judge she misses son
BY RUMMANA HUSSAIN Criminal Courts Reporter rhussain@suntimes.com February 22, 2012 5:52PM
Trenton Booker | photo courtesy Cook County State's Attorney's Office | Sun-Times
Updated: March 24, 2012 9:06AM
Three weeks after he was killed in a hit-and-run crash involving a drunken Chicago Police officer, Trenton Booker’s mother sadly glimpsed the empty chair that the always smiling 13-year-old was supposed to sit in for his eighth grade graduation.
“Instead of me being able to take pictures like the other parents I stared at the chair he would have sat in, which was covered with his class T-shirt,” Barbara Norman said at Wednesday’s sentencing hearing for Richard Bolling, the veteran narcotics cop convicted in the deadly May 22, 2009, collision.
“. . . .It was too fresh then for me to realize this was the first of a lifetime of things we would not get to experience with Trenton.”
Bolling, 42, continued to look down when Trenton’s father, Terrence, fought back tears, remembering “the light of his life” and when Cook County prosecutors read victim impact statements from Trenton’s sisters describing the unbearable pain of losing the loveable “prankster” who once cut off one of their ponytails for a laugh.
The officer grew more emotional, dabbing a tissue to his eyes, when his attorney Thomas Needham called 15 people to the stand to vouch for him, including his parents, fellow officers and retired Cook County judges Wilbur Crooks and Thomas Sumner.
Bolling’s friends and relatives painted him as an exemplary officer, model neighbor and honorable family man who is so forthcoming in admitting his mistakes, he even wept when he committed a “hard foul” at a pick-up basketball game a few years ago.
Ella Bolling said her family empathizes with Trenton’s family and noted that every time she discusses the fatal wreck at 81st and Ashland with Bolling, he breaks down.
“He’s not the thoughtless inconsiderate person he was made out to be in the trial,” she said, urging Judge Matthew Coghlan to spare her son from prison time.
Bolling’s father Douglas, a retired Chicago Police commander, said the off-duty incident was a “horrible, horrible mistake”
Crooks called it an “aberration.”
“That was not the Richard Bolling that I know. Oftentimes good people find themselves in bad circumstances. Bad things happen to good people,” Crooks said.
“The verdict is in and justice must be served but I ask the court to temper that justice with mercy.”
Terrence Booker was not impressed. All he could think of was the squad car recording of a hungry Bolling rambling on about the fast food he spilled inside his Dodge Charger instead of the bicycling teen he had just mowed down at the time of his arrest.
“They could bring the whole police force up there and talk about the real Richard Bolling,” Booker said during a break in Wednesday’s hearing.
“I heard the real Richard Bolling on the tape talking about his White Castle. The real Richard Bolling is the one who left the scene of the crime.”
Bolling faces probation to up to 15 years in prison when Coghlan is expected to sentence him on March 6.
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