Local Police 'Can't Stop Crying' over MIT Officer Slain in Shootout - East Idaho News
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Local Police ‘Can’t Stop Crying’ over MIT Officer Slain in Shootout

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041913 SeanCollierMITCopShot?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1366403647720Boston Police Dept(BOSTON) — Sean Collier, then a civilian at the Somerville Police Department, where he worked in information technology for five years, had dreamed of becoming a police officer. So he left last year to become a patrol officer at MIT, but his name still floated to the top of the list for consideration as a cop in Somerville.

When his former colleagues there heard that he had been killed in a shootout Thursday night with the alleged Boston Marathon bombers, they were “devastated.”

“All the girls and dispatchers can’t stop crying,” Lt. William Rymill of the Somerville Police said. “It’s a real shock to us. He was not liked, he was loved.

“We have lost a member of the family,” he added.

Collier, 26, was found in his car at about 10:20 p.m. Thursday night at the corner of Vassar Street and Main Street in Cambridge, on the MIT campus, authorities said. He was transported to Massachusetts General Hospital with multiple gunshot wounds, where he was pronounced dead.

One of Collier’s police academy colleagues, MBTA officer Richard H. Donahue Jr., 33, was injured hours later, when police pulled over a carjacked vehicle with the alleged bombing suspects. Donahue, who’s from Woburn, sustained a critical wound to the thigh, according to the Boston Globe.

He is reportedly in stable condition.

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

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