Mike Charbonneau is at left

Two Milwaukee police officers were shot recently, and a UPS Teamster is being credited with helping in the arrest of the suspect.

When two officers, in uniform and driving a police vehicle, were shot by a bicyclist before they could draw their weapons at 3:10 p.m. on Tuesday, June 9, Mike Charbonneau was there.

“I was driving where I normally drive every day and I saw a struggle—police trying to get a guy in cuffs,” said Charbonneau, who started work at UPS in 1982 and began driving in 1991.

Charbonneau, a member of Local 344, was about 30 feet from a commotion on the sidewalk. Just as he was driving past, he heard five shots. “I was listening for the ping of bullets off the side of the truck,” he said.

“I saw the guy run up the next street, so I went to the next street to the south in the package car to try and see where he was going,” he said. Charbonneau said many neighborhood residents were out, so he spread the word. “I told everyone I saw to look for this guy and described him.”

Charbonneau then went back to the scene and told the police what he saw.

“I didn’t think anything else about it until the next day,” he said. That’s when media calls came flooding in. His actions earned him a lot of coverage, including the Milwaukee chief of police saying of Charbonneau, “This is what Brown can do for you.”

The suspect was arrested in a home less than an hour later, and police recovered a gun.

“This neighborhood came through today. At every key moment of this investigation, someone from the community stepped forward,” said Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn at the scene of the crime. “A taxicab driver came to the assistance of the officers as they were bleeding in the street. A UPS driver tried to follow the footsteps of the suspect as he fled (from) the scene. Finally, an individual homeowner identified for us where he thought the suspect might be hiding.”

Charbonneau, whose father was a Milwaukee police officer, told a reporter after the accident that he was no hero. “I just did what I could do to help,” Charbonneau said.