Constable: State trooper who sacrificed himself will still be with his family for holidays
This Christmas at Disney World, with all its thrills and spectacles, will fall short of the simple joy of last Christmas at home in Antioch.
“Last Christmas, Jerry was just as excited as the girls. He enjoyed putting the presents under the tree,” Stacy Ellis says, explaining how her husband loved making things just right for their daughters, Kaylee and Zoe. “We were able to have a drink together and sit in the darkness with the tree. Just me and him. This year, he won't be here for that. So that's pretty sad.”
A roadway sign along I-94 in Green Oaks lets strangers know they are driving on the Trooper Gerald W. Ellis Memorial Highway, dedicated in his honor after Jerry drove his squad car into the path of a drunk man driving east in the westbound lanes toward oncoming traffic. The crash happened at 3:25 a.m. on Saturday, March 30, as the 36-year-old trooper was finishing his shift.
The day before, Jerry's mother, Debbie Nicholson, came up for the weekend from her home in Macomb. That Friday night, Jerry, his mom and the girls went out for ice cream.
“I went out with friends,” Stacy remembers. “How much does that suck?”
She woke at 5 a.m., expecting Jerry to be home. Sometimes, after a shift, he'd chill in the basement for a bit before coming to bed, but he wasn't there.
“I just need to know you're OK,” Stacy texted Jerry without getting a response. A dedicated officer, Jerry sometimes stayed late to wrap things up. Stacy went to the Facebook page for local police and fire reports.
She saw the report of a collision. Then someone posted a photograph of the crash scene showing her husband's squad car. When she talked to the Illinois State Police on the phone, they told her they were sending a car to pick her up and take her to Advocate Condell Medical Center in Libertyville, where Jerry was taken. She waited in her front yard.
“When they arrived, there were five cop cars, and they all got out,” remembers Stacy, who knew that display meant Jerry was dead. “I'm glad they told me outside, because now I don't have that memory in my house.”
Jerry's presence fills their home.
“We talk about him all the time. He's everywhere in this house,” says Stacy, who has a shrine to her husband, hung his stocking on the mantel for Christmas, drapes his “End of Watch” blanket over the couch, and notes that he rebuilt most of the rooms in their house and was good to their dogs, Sadie, a 6-year-old beagle, and Lila, a 2-year-old miniature Australian shepherd. “Even now, Sadie will still look for him in the basement.”
Stacy makes sure Kaylee, 8, and Zoe, 6, remember their dad. Kaylee recalls the day he took the training wheels off her bicycle.
“He was kind, sweet, sweet-hearted, fun and silly,” says Kaylee, who wrote about her dad on Father's Day and gave a presentation about him at school for Veterans Day. “He was really excited playing with us a lot. He was really fun.”
Jerry has been a constant in Stacy's life since she was a college kid at Western Illinois University, looking for a place to stay for the summer. A girlfriend said her housemate, an Army guy who grew up in the nearby small farm town of Colchester, was leaving for training in Germany, and Stacy could take over his room.
On June 5, 2007, two years to the day before their wedding, she not only took over Jerry's room, but she agreed to take care of Juice, his miniature pinscher.
“I knew I loved him the minute I met him,” Stacy recalls, pulling out a photo of the two of them in college, when he was 24 and she was 21. “Look at this handsome man. He was very kind from the beginning. Very shy. He gave me his email address and we emailed back and forth every day while he was in Germany, so I really got to know him.”
When Jerry returned from Germany, she gave him back his room and his dog. She moved into the place, and they started dating.
“Wow. This is nice,” she remembers thinking. “This is like the real deal.”
She'd cook him steak and potatoes, meatloaf, noodles, chicken and salmon. “Now, I cook for the neighbors because who can cook for yourself,” Stacy says.
A social worker, Stacy was employed in the welfare office in Kenosha, Wisconsin, until recently, when she decided their daughters needed a stay-at-home mom. Jerry, an Army veteran who completed a tour of duty in Iraq and trained in Germany and El Salvador, graduated from Western Illinois University in 2007 with a law enforcement and justice administration degree before landing his dream job as an Illinois trooper. They both wanted careers helping people.
“Maybe that's why we got along so well,” she says. The week before he died, Jerry delivered a dose of Narcan and gave CPR to a drug overdose victim who lived.
The Christmas tree boasts a “The buck stops here” ornament in honor of Jerry's passion for deer hunting. On his birthday in January, his family will attend a rodeo in his memory. In May, they'll travel to Washington, D.C., to see Jerry's name added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial.
Stacy's mom, Julie Voight, who lives in Johnsburg, comes to Antioch several times each week to help out with the girls.
“They understand that he's not coming back, but he's still here,” Stacy says.
“Just like in the Army, he knew he could die,” Stacy says of her husband's police work. Jerry certainly didn't want to die, but Stacy is positive that he put himself in danger as a way to protect the approaching cars carrying families that might have been hit head-on if Jerry hadn't stopped the drunken driver, who also died in the crash.
“He wouldn't take it back,” Stacy says. “If it wasn't Jerry, it would have been one of those cars full of people. I'll take the pain for all those families he saved.”