CHICAGO (AP) – A 13-year-old Hispanic boy had apparently dropped a gun and was beginning to raise his hands less than a second before a police officer shot him to death in Chicago, according to images released Thursday under community pressure. .
A still from the video taken by the body camera of police officer Eric Stillman shows that Adam Toledo had nothing in his hands and that his arms were at least partially raised when Stillman shot him in the chest around 3 a.m. on September 29. March.
Police say the teenager was carrying a pistol before he was shot. And stillman’s camera footage shows the officer shining his lamp on a gun on the ground near Toledo after he shot him. Police officers were responding to reports of shooting in the area.
The dissemination of the images and other materials of the investigation occurs at a delicate moment, since the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, accused of the death of George Floyd, and recently another black man, Daunte Wright, is underway. , at the hands of a policeman in a suburb of the city.
Before the Civilian Office of Police Accountability (COPA) – an independent group that investigates all shootings involving Chicago police – released the images on its website, Mayor Lori Lightfoot called on citizens to stay tuned. peace, and some businesses in the city center placed wooden boards in their windows for fear of possible disturbances.
“We live in a city that is traumatized by a long history of violence and police misconduct,” Lightfoot said. “And although we do not have enough information to be judge and jury in this particular situation, it is certainly understandable why so many of our residents have that well-known sense of outrage and pain. It is even more evident than the trust between our community and the Corps of order is far from being healed and is still extremely damaged. ”
In all, 19 seconds passed from when Stillman got out of his patrol to the moment he shot Toledo. His camera footage shows the police officer chasing Toledo on foot down an alley for several seconds and yelling at him, “Police! Stop! Stop right now!” Using profanity.
Once the teen slows down, Stillman yells at him, “Hands! Hands! Show me your (profanity) hands!”
Then Toledo turns to the camera and Stillman yells “Drop her!” And when he was repeating that order, Stillman opens fire and Toledo falls. As he approaches the injured teenager, Stillman radioes for an ambulance. The boy is heard pleading to “stay awake,” and as other officers arrive, one of them says he doesn’t feel a pulse and begins CPR.
Adeena Weiss-Ortiz, a lawyer for the Toledo family, told reporters after the images and other videos were released that these “speak for themselves.”
“Adam, for the last second of his life, didn’t have a gun in his hand. The agent yelled at him, ‘Show me your hands.’ Adam obeyed,” he said.
Weiss-Ortiz said it is irrelevant whether Toledo was holding a gun before he turned to the police officer.
“If he had a gun, he threw it. The agent told him to show his hands, he paid attention. He turned around,” he said.
The Chicago Police Department generally does not release the names of officers involved in such shootings at such an early stage in the investigation, but the name, age and race of Stillman, who is 34 and white, were mentioned in the Civilian Office of Police Accountability reports released Thursday.
Weiss-Ortiz said he investigated Stillman and “from what I understand, he had no disciplinary action, no prior events.”
Lightfoot urged the public to keep their peace and avoid judgment until the police disciplinary board can finalize its investigation. Her voice cracking, the mayor criticized the city’s long history of violence and police misconduct, especially in ethnic minority communities, saying that too many young people are vulnerable “to systemic failures that we simply have to fix.”
He also noted that watching the recording was “unbearable.”
“As a mother, this is not something you want children to see,” she added.
Along with the police inspector, Lightfoot asked COPA to release Stillman’s body camera video. In addition, the agency released the videos of other body cameras, four third-party videos and two recordings of calls made to the 911 emergency number, as well as six audio recordings of ShotSpotter, the technology that alerted police to the shooting in the area. from Little Village, a predominantly black and Latino neighborhood on the west side of town, which led officers to head there that morning.
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