Where Are The Illinois Suspects?

On Tuesday morning, Fox Lake, Illinois police officer Lt. Joe Gliniewicz was killed. As CNN details, he'd reported that he was chasing three suspicious people on foot. While the exact circumstances of his death aren't yet clear, his fellow officers found him shot, with the three people he was pursuing nowhere to be seen. Over the last day, as you'd expect, the slaying has provoked an enormous response, with authorities launching a large-scale hunt for the suspects. So what locations are the manhunt in Illinois focusing on?

If you're not so familiar with the lay of the land in Illinois, Fox Lake is a village in the upper reaches of the state, rubbing up against its northern border with Wisconsin. It's not a terribly large place in terms of population, with just over 10,000 citizens, and that relatively sleepy community intimacy can make events like this all the more shocking and destabilizing.

According to The Washington Post, the search was initially focused on about a two-square-mile area of Fox Lake, with an abundance of officers, dogs, and helicopters peering down from above. That makes a great deal of sense, if they believe that the sought suspects (if they're even traveling together) are on foot, since they've only had one day since Gliniewicz's death to move.

Now, however, Lake County Sheriff's Detective Chris Covelli has told Newsweek that the manhunt has expanded to incorporate some residential and business areas. In a Wednesday afternoon presser, Lake County Major Crimes Task Force commander George Filenko lauded the community for giving leads, and said that surveillance video was being used to help track the suspects:

There is video throughout the area, its pretty common now a days not only for businesses but for private residents to have sophisticated video systems. We have been canvassing throughout the area to identify that video and review it. There is a long process to review the video itself.

Filenko also noted that the manhunt has not expanded into neighboring Wisconsin as of yet, but that isn't stopping the Badger State from taking the risks seriously. Fox Lake sits less than ten miles from the Wisconsin border, near enough that even a person on foot could easily cross over within a few hours, to say nothing of someone with access to transportation.

Again, there's no indication of where the suspects are — at least not any that's been made public. Police departments have no interest in broadcasting where they're looking, because that could theoretically aid fugitives in avoiding detection. But according to the Wisconsin Journal-Sentinel, authorities within the state are already on alert, contributing some aerial searches to the effort.