#By Ben Joravsky
“It’s depressing in here [the Rehabilitation Institute],” he says. “I mean the nurses and doctors are great, but it’s boring and dreary and very, very difficult. The worst part is the loss of vision–I can’t read and I love to read. I do my rehab but mostly I’m in bed with too much time–time to think about how it is that I wound up here.”
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He moved to Philadelphia in connection with a Dutch college program that awarded him credits for working with a neighborhood group to organize block clubs. A few years later he found his way to Chicago. “I loved it here, absolutely loved it,” he says. “I loved the lake, the architecture, the blues. I was going store to store helping the farm workers organize a lettuce boycott. I read Alinsky’s Reveille for Radicals. I was going to be an organizer.”
In 1985 he passed the police exam; a year later he was on the force. “It was good for me. I stopped smoking, I started jogging like crazy, I lost all this weight. I totally changed my life. For over four years I worked out of the Third District at 71st and Cottage Grove. Then one night I was working with a kid, fairly new on the job, and we see a guy running down the street–and my partner, he tries to cut him off. The whole thing was pretty stupid. We chased him down an alley and ended up in a pitch dark basement without our flashlights–we left the car in too much of a hurry to bring them. I can’t see a thing except the muzzle flashing. I don’t know who’s shooting who, but I hear my partner go down and the guy runs off into an adjoining room. I called for help and like a real dummy I go looking for him. I found him hiding and he peacefully gave himself up. He had a revolver but it was out of bullets–he’d fired all six shots. When I think about it, he could have killed me because he saw me before I saw him.
Two passersby, Ben Howard and Valdemar Delgado, pulled Van Vegten and Koman from the car just before it exploded. “They had to reach through the burning car and drag us out. They were guardian angels. If they didn’t pull us out, Matt and I probably would have died in the explosion.”
“It was kind of hard getting interest,” says Dougherty. “The media’s attention is very short-term. They were writing a lot about Jimmy Mullen [the police officer shot in Rogers Park]. I guess they only have room for one injured cop in the papers. It was a cataclysmic time, when you think about it–Girl X, Lenard Clark. Maybe people can only take so much. Meanwhile, Andre Van Vegten’s sitting up there in the hospital.”
