Northwestern Memorial Hospital.

"To myself and to the other judges in the Criminal Division, it's just a great

personal loss," said Thomas Fitzgerald, the division's presiding judge. "It's

also a loss to our whole community because he was a man who loved law,

he loved justice and he knew about mercy

he was a prodigious worker who tempered everything he did with

compassion. Every place he was as a judge was better because he was

there."

Cook County State's Atty. Richard Devine said Judge Brady "was the finest

of judges and the finest of people. His exceptional qualities both as a

prosecutor and as a judge were combined with a warmth of character and

depth of intelligence that make his loss a truly sad one. I will miss him."

In 1995, Judge Brady presided over the case of Helmut Carsten Hofer, 26,

who was charged with slaying 56-year-old Suzanne Olds in the garage of her

Wilmette home in 1993. Hofer, a business associate of Olds' husband, Dean,

later was acquitted by a jury.

Judge Brady also presided over the pretrial hearings in the case of then-

Chicago Police Officer Gregory Becker, whom a jury later convicted of armed

violence and other charges in the fatal shooting while off duty of Joseph

Gould, a homeless man.where he worked as a prosecutor on more than 70

jury trials and more than 500 bench trials.

While with the office, he spent a year as supervisor of Branch 66, in which