Jan. 16--Seconds after a Chicago police officer opened fire on him as he ran from a South Side traffic stop, 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman had collapsed in the street when the officer's partner approached to take him into custody.
"I give up. I'm shot," Chatman said to Officer Lou Toth, according to Toth's statement to investigators at the scene.
A bullet had struck Chatman in the right side, pierced his heart and lodged in his spine. He died on the way to a hospital.
The detail of Chatman's last words was included in hundreds of pages of investigative records released by the city Friday that laid out how Chatman's suspected involvement in a violent robbery and carjacking ended with his fatal shooting less than a mile away.
The documents -- which included detectives' reports from the scene, autopsy results, inventory logs, lineups and transcripts of witness interviews -- show that Officer Kevin Fry consistently told investigators he saw Chatman turn with a dark object in his hand as he ran full speed across the busy South Shore neighborhood intersection in the early afternoon.
"Officer Fry said he believed that the object was a handgun and he was in fear of his partner's life, as Toth was in close proximity to the offender," said an incident report documenting Fry's initial interview with detectives. The object turned out to be a black iPhone box.
Attorneys for Chatman's mother, who has filed a wrongful-death lawsuit, contend the videos prove that Chatman was trying to get away from the police when Fry opened fire without justification.
The document dump came a day after surveillance footage from Chatman's January 2013 shooting was released by the city as it works to change a long-standing policy to keep evidence in police shootings under wraps. It is all part of the fallout since the release of the disturbing video of Laquan McDonald's fatal shooting by a Chicago police officer roiled the city, leading to the firing of police Superintendent Garry McCarthy and calls for the resignations of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez.
In lifting a protective order in the Chatman family's lawsuit Thursday, U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman ripped city attorneys for the about-face after months of fighting to keep the videos secret, sarcastically hailing the move as the "Age of Enlightenment."
