Oak Park Detective Allan Reddins

For the first time in more than four generations, the Oak Park Police Department will drape its entrance portals with black bunting to mourn the loss of one of their own from injuries suffered while on duty.

Detective Allan Reddins, 40, was fatally shot shortly after 9:30 a.m. Friday while responding to a call of a man with a gun leaving a bank on the 1000 block of Lake Street in downtown Oak Park.

The shooting took place during the Black Friday start to the holiday shopping season, as many people made their way to and from the downtown area along Lake Street.

A statement from the village read that “Oak Park Fire Department responded to a call of shots fired at about 9:36 a.m. on the 800 block of Lake Street … . He had been wounded in his left side. He was taken to Loyola Medical Center in Maywood, where he was pronounced dead at 10:10 a.m.”

“The alleged offender,” the statement said, “was shot in the leg. He is in custody and is being treated at Loyola and is in stable condition.”

Reddins had apparently confronted the man on the south side of Lake Street, a couple hundred feet west of the intersection at Oak Park Avenue.

One witness told reporters that he heard “about six gunshots,” and after a brief pause, several more shots fired. Another man said he heard “12 to 15 shots.”

Another witness to the shooting told NBC Channel 5 that he saw police retrieve a handgun from the wounded suspect, and that at least one other gun was present.

“They were checking his pockets, and they found a little handgun, but off to the side there was an ARP, with a flashlight,” the young man told NBC 5, possibly referring to an AR-15 rifle. “I don’t know which gun he used to shoot at the cops, but he had multiple guns on him.”

Oak Park Chief of Police Shatonya Johnson declined to comment on any details of the incident, citing the ongoing investigation into the deadly shooting. She did not name the suspect being held under police custody at Loyola Medical Center.

Clearly trying hard to control her emotions, Johnson called Reddins, who joined the department in 2019 a “natural born leader and devoted father,” who “loved his mother.”

“He (was) definitely a family man. The Oak Park Police Department, Johnson added, “are a family. We support each other.”

That family, she said, “is hurting.”

Shortly before 3 p.m. Friday, dozens of uniformed police officers and firefighters lined up outside Loyola Medical Center, standing in salute to the fallen officer. An American flag hung from the extended ladder of a Fire Department truck as the ambulance carrying Reddin’s body passed under it.

As the ambulance carrying Reddin’s body went east on the Eisenhower Expressway en route to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office on the Southwest Side of Chicago, a fire truck was parked in silent salute on each overpass along the route.

As tragic as Friday’s events were, it could have been even worse. The multiple bursts of shots were fired on a heavily trafficked street, across Lake Street from the ground floor entry area of the village’s main library, where people of all ages routinely pass through to access the facility. One large plate glass window on the south side of the library, facing Lake Street, had four large bullet holes across a three-foot section, at about chest height for an average male.

While the medical condition of the suspect in Reddin’s murder is characterized as “stable,” it is not known when he will be released from the hospital, or when he will stand before a judge in bond court at the Maybrook Courthouse off of First Avenue in Maywood.