Retired officer killed in Afghanistan will join great-grandfather on memorial wall
BY FRANK MAIN Staff Reporter/fmain@suntimes.com August 14, 2012 5:58PM
Thomas Boyle, a retired Chicago Police officer, was killed June 19 in Afghanistan, where he was providing security training as a private contractor.
Article Extras
Updated: September 16, 2012 6:21AM
Retired Chicago Police Officer Thomas Boyle — who died in Afghanistan this summer while working as a private security contractor — will join his great-grandfather on the Police Memorial Wall.
“He was a strong American — he loved his country,” his wife, Pauline Boyle, said Tuesday.
Boyle’s great-grandfather, William Mooney, was a Chicago Police officer when he was killed in the line of duty in 1908.
On Monday, Boyle will become the second retired Chicago Police officer honored on the wall near Soldier Field, according to former Chicago Police Supt. Phil Cline, the executive director of the Chicago Police Memorial Foundation.
Boyle was a decorated Marine who served in the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. He joined the police department in 1970 and was in the headlines in 1985 for helping capture two brothers who fatally shot Wheeling Police Officer Kenneth Dawson.
“On the day of Tom’s funeral in Barrington, the first person there was the widow of Officer Dawson,” Pauline Boyle said. “I was so touched.”
Boyle, 62, was working in the Foster District on the North Side when he retired in 2001. For about a decade, he worked as a security consultant in Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan.
He was killed by Afghan insurgents in a compound near Kandahar on June 19. During a battle, 26 people were killed and wounded, Cline said.
Boyle loved the adventure of working overseas, and those he trained respected him, his wife said. “One of the colonels wrote and said [the Afghanis] adored him,” she said. “They called him ‘Baba,’ which means grandfather in Pashto.”
Boyle’s great-grandfather, William Mooney, was killed while conducting a burglary investigation in 1908. He spotted three suspicious men near a building, and one of the men pulled a gun and fired. Mooney was struck and died two days later.
“They recovered the gun that killed Officer Mooney, and I still have it,” Pauline Boyle said, adding that her husband once fired it.
A father and son are honored on the memorial wall, too.
Officer Emmett D. Laughlin was killed in a 1939 squad-car accident. His son, Officer Dennis Laughlin, died of a heart attack after he struggled with a robbery suspect in 1960.
