Festus Police Chief Tim Lewis recently presented commendations to three officers – detectives Tom Cox and Alec Litzau and Detective Sgt. Lewis Pippin.
Each of the officers received a certificate at the June 27 Festus City Council meeting.
Lewis said they deserved the recognition after spending countless hours of hard work on recent major cases.
He said most of those cases are still under investigation and he did not want to give details about them. However, two of the cases involved shootings, one of them a fatal shooting.
Maleak R. Brown, 22, who has addresses in Barnhart and Illinois, was charged with murder and other offenses for allegedly shooting and killing Marcus Lorenzo James, 22, of Festus on June 15 at an apartment in the 1500 block of Westvale Drive in Festus, court records show.
The other case involved Toshun L. Prater, 20, who allegedly shot a De Soto man several times on April 22 at Shropshire Park in Festus.
“(The officers) put in several 16-to-18-hour days to make sure the reports were finished, and all the paperwork was in order before we applied for charges,” Lewis said.