Chicago Cop Killer Says He 'Never Got a Chance to Live'

Some people “will not be saved by blind, naive compassion,” says Sandra Wortham.

One of those is Marcus Floyd, the man who killed her brother five years ago.

Chicago Police Officer Thomas Wortham IV lived a life “exemplary beyond measure,” Cook County Judge Timothy Joyce declared Friday in meting out punishment for Floyd on Tuesday.

Officer Wortham, who’d returned to Chicago after his second tour of duty in Iraq, was in front of his parents’ home in Chatham with his new motorcycle and photographs of his recent travels, which he showed his mom and dad over family dinner, when Floyd and his cousin tried to steal the new bike at gunpoint. Two other men served as lookouts.

Wortham’s father, Thomas Wortham III, a retired police sergeant, saw a gun pointed at his son’s head and came to his aid. Marcus Floyd’s cousin, Brian Floyd, fired a shot into Wortham IV’s belly as the young man shouted “I’m a police officer” and pulled his weapon.

The elder Wortham, with his own gun in one hand, picked up his son’s weapon and a gun battle ensued. He shot Marcus Floyd at least five times, gravely wounding him. Brian Floyd was shot dead.

The judge praised the father’s actions as “brave and selfless.”

The lookouts sped away, leaving the Floyds in the street and striking the mortally wounded Wortham with their car as they escaped. The elder Wortham watched his 30-year-old son die in front of the house where he grew up, the house built by his grandfather.

The slain Wortham, a Brother Rice High School graduate, risked his life serving his country in two tours in war-torn Iraq for the Army National Guard. He risked his life every day on the job in the city of Chicago with a badge on his chest and a gun strapped to his hip.

As family, friends and fellow officers mourned in the days after the slaying, Freddrenna Lyle, a former alderman who’d known Wortham for years, told the Chicago Sun-Times he was “the best we had to offer.”

He helped children, and he worked in the community to improve local parks.

And he was ever-so-proud to be a cop, like his dad.

The accomplices, Toyious Taylor and Paris McGee, were caught later and are doing life sentences now. McGee, who fired shots at the elder Wortham that night, listed robbin’ on his Facebook page as one of his personal interests, according to a Sun-Times report at the time, and bragged “I hav no problem wit pullin da trigger!!!!”

The “best we had to offer,” undone by young men with nothing to offer.

Marcus Floyd later claimed his wounds caused amnesia, and he insists to this day he doesn’t remember the crimes. A clinical neuropsychologist backed that up in court. Still, a jury found him guilty in October. On Tuesday, he stunned the Worthams, according to a Chicago Tribune report from the courtroom, when he told the judge the elder Wortham broke the law by shooting him.

“I never got a chance to live my life,” protested Floyd, who’s now 24, through tears.

The judge, unmoved, decided that whatever life Floyd the cop killer has left will be spent in prison, regardless of whether he remembers the despicable act he perpetrated on a warm spring night in May 2010 when he tried to steal a motorcycle and instead took a good man’s life.

“I can only pray that God knows something I don’t,” Sandra Wortham said in court, “and that true justice for Marcus Floyd will come in some other, special way.”