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THE CLOSE OF THE FILE
The case line ends where the documented record thins, and the boundaries are printed. The department's other early line-of-duty deaths — Patrolmen Lewis Keller (1898) and Samuel Cooper (1900), Hans Brandt (1916), Fred Buhland (1921), Neil McIntyre on Christmas Day 1923, Lloyd Thompson (1932) and Charles Farkas Sr. (1933) — stand on the memorial roll the Common Council read into its minutes in April 2008; their cases did not produce, in the sources reached, a court record of this section's stature, and they are honored on the roll rather than enlarged here. The one modern killing that fills South Bend's civic record as no trial could — the shooting of Eric Logan by Sergeant Ryan O'Neill in June 2019 — is carried in the City Controversies section of this history, where the prosecutor's finding, the federal civil judgment and the Supreme Court's refusal to hear the case are stated together; it is pointed to there, and not retried here. And the appellate record's most recent South Bend murder affirmances — a 2025 memorandum decision affirming a fifty-five-year sentence for the 2020 killing of a three-year-old, and a January 2026 memorandum decision affirming an eighty-year sentence for a 2023 double shooting — rest at survey size in the Crime section until their records reach the depth this section requires. The permanent record, as it stands, runs to thirteen cases: one ending in acquittal, one in a reversed conviction and dismissed charges, two in killers dead before any court could sit, and the rest in convictions — by verdict or by plea — that stand as the courts left them.
Sources:
- South Bend Common Council, Resolution No. 3852-08 (28 April 2008) — the memorial roll of the department's fifteen fallen officers
- City Controversies, this history — the Logan episode and its three verdicts
- Shaver v. State, No. 24A-CR-837 (Ind. Ct. App. 31 January 2025), and Lawrence v. State, No. 25A-CR-1369 (Ind. Ct. App. 21 January 2026), memorandum decisions — the survey-size affirmances named in the entry