Omaha remembers special police officer

A retired Omaha police detective has died, after years of helping law-enforcement agencies in two states. After his son, an Omaha police officer, was gunned down in 1995, Jimmy Wilson Senior started a foundation and sold t-shirts to raise what eventually totaled more than a million dollars. He gave it away, for things like bulletproof vests for local police and other law-enforcement and fire agencies in Nebraska and western Iowa. Council Bluffs police captain Jerry Roth says the Jimmy Wilson Junior Foundation included the Bluffs police among its beneficiaries. He says they had a project to put a video camera in each marked police car in Nebraska and then to spread into Iowa, and they gave the Bluffs police five or six cameras for their squad cars. They’d raised an awful lot of money, says the captain, and Wilson wanted to spread it around, and being right on the border, it became part of the mission to help agencies in Iowa, also.