Hearings to determine whether four Chicago police officers accused of lying about the 2014 shooting of Laquan McDonald should be fired began Wednesday before the Chicago Police Board.
Seeking their termination, the department filed administrative charges with the police board against Sgt. Stephen Franko and officers Janet Mondragon, Daphne Sebastian and Ricardo Viramontes in August 2016.
None of the four was criminally charged, but the hearings this week in the downtown office of the police board will take on the tone of a courtroom trial.
In opening statements, John Gibbons, the attorney representing Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson, told the police board: “They had a simple but important duty: to tell the truth.”
Each officer allegedly gave or approved false statements about the shooting of McDonald in the 4100 block of South Pulaski Road — accounts that were refuted by police dashboard camera footage.
The only thing everyone agreed on Wednesday was that things boiled down to a matter of perception.
Franko, who was not at the scene of the shooting, said he signed off on accounts provided by Van Dyke and his partner, Joseph Walsh, that said McDonald was attacking them when he was shot because that was “their perception of what occurred that night.”
The fact that Franko saw “bits and pieces” of the video over the shoulders of detectives who were were watching it on a laptop didn’t change that, Franko said Wednesday.
Franko said he watched the video for about two seconds and looked away when McDonald’s body hit the pavement.
“As soon as he went down I turned away … because I don’t enjoy watching people get shot,” he said.
Asked if he saw McDonald use deadly force in the video, Franko said: “In those seconds of the video I saw, there was none.”
When asked about raising discrepancies with his superiors in what he saw in the video versus the accounts provided by his fellow officers, Franko said, “That is not my responsibility.”
Attorneys representing Viramontes and Sebastian said that dashcam video will show their clients were not lying when they told investigators that McDonald turned toward Van Dyke before the shooting.
Mondragon, who arrived on the scene in her police vehicle with Sebastian in the passenger seat, told investigators she didn’t see the shooting because she was looking down to shift the car into park.
Gibbons said Mondragon was lying and the video will show her car was in motion at the time of the shooting. “Parked cars cannot move forward,” he said.
Her attorney, William Fehy, told the police board that Mondragon’s story will hold up.
“She was startled. This was a startling event. She did put her head down. She did stop the car. She did put it in park,” he said.
“Human beings are not robots … her perception was her perception,” he said.
The hearings are expected to last through Friday. The board will deliberate in May. The first board meeting where a decision could be handed down will be June 20.
All four have been stripped of their police powers and assigned to desk duty pending the outcome of the hearings.
The police board decided to hold off on deciding the fate of the officers’ careers until after the conclusion of the trial of Officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot McDonald 16 times.
Van Dyke was convicted by a jury in October of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery. He’s serving an 81-month prison sentence.
This week’s hearings come three months after a Cook County judge acquitted three other Chicago cops accused of taking part in a coverup. In that case, detective David March and officers Joseph Walsh and Thomas Gaffney faced charges of conspiracy, obstructing justice and official misconduct.
Prosecutors argued that despite reports from those officers casting McDonald as a knife-wielding aggressor, video showed the teen moving away from the officers when the first shots were fired by Van Dyke.
Judge Domenica Stephenson said the case wasn’t as simple as that. The judge noted that two people can view the same event and describe it differently, but that doesn’t mean either is lying. Errors in reports are not crimes, the judge said.
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