Chicago Cop Kills Two While Drunk Driving and Now Police Host Party to Help Cop

This makes me sick.

According to the Tribune Company’s Chicago Breaking News Center Chicago police officers are throwing a benefit this Friday for Joseph Frugoli, a police officer who is accused of crashing his car and killing two people while driving drunk on the Dan Ryan.

(Excuse me, but shouldn’t this be the other way around? )

Joseph Frugoli

An invitation to the event is posted on the Web site of the Fraternal Order of Police, and appears next to the numbers “10-1,” radio code for officer in need of assistance.

Read the invitation here.

It says:  “You’re invited to assist Detective Joe Frugoli.” Tickets cost $50. Jack Halloran, Area One Detective Division, is listed as the contact for the event.  (The location to FOP Headquarters, 1412 W. Washington Blvd.)

For the record, Frugoli, who was off-duty at the time of drunk driving,  has been charged with a DUI and reckless homicide and freed on $500,000 bail.

According to Chicago Breaking News, Police said Frugoli’s blood-alcohol content was more than three times the legal limit when his Lexus SUV struck a car that had pulled over on the Dan Ryan Expressway north of 18th Street. The car exploded into flames and killed Andrew Cazares, 23, and Fausto Manzera, 21.

Frugoli is also accused of leaving the scene. 

So the person who is charged with protecting the people, killed the people and then fled the scene. 

(I’m having flashbacks to when beefy Chicago police officer Anthony Abbate was caught, on video, beating up pint-size Chicago bartender Karolina Obrycka, who refused to serve the drunken cop more drinks.  (See that video here.) The kicker: this June, the Cook County Circuit Court Judge John Fleming convicted Abbate of pummeling the bartender, but only gave him two years of prohobation and anger management. )

Fraternal Order of Police President Mark Donahue tried to distance the organization from the Frugoli fundraising-event, according to the Chicago Breaking News Center, saying it was “planned by some of the officer’s friends.”

Donahue also said FOP members have a right to use the building, and emphasized that the FOP was not involved or advocating one way or the other regarding the Frugoli case.

Maybe so, but allowing an event to be hosted in a building by your members (police officers) for other members (police officers)  is guilty by association. You may not condoning it, but you’re certainly not distancing yourself from it either.

Instead, the police should host a FOP fundraiser for the families of the two people Frugoli killed. Don’t you think?