Dec. 08--Chicago police say Ronald Johnson III pointed a gun at them during a foot chase after they rushed to the scene of reported gunfire. An attorney for Johnson's family says a trigger-happy cop shot an unarmed Johnson in the back, and police planted a gun in Johnson's hand as he lay on the ground.
Police dash-cam video, released under intense public pressure, shows ... chaos.
A busy commercial street, after dark. Lots of police cars. A fleeing figure -- later identified as Johnson -- pumping his arms as he runs out of range of the camera, and another figure -- identified as Officer George Hernandez -- leaping from an unmarked car and firing after him.
At a news conference Monday, Cook County State's Attorney Anita Alvarez showed those chilling, critical seconds of video to reporters, then rewound and showed them again in slow motion. She also showed a grainy still image, captured from the video.
Was that a gun in Johnson's hand? Alvarez believes so. It could be.
We can't fault her decision not to second-guess the officer, who did not have the benefit of rewinding a video for another look.
Alvarez played recordings of several 911 calls from alarmed citizens who reported multiple gunshots the night of Oct. 12, 2014. She gave this account of events: At 53rd Street and King Drive, police pulled over a car with a shattered windshield. They were interviewing the driver when Johnson, who had been a passenger in the car minutes earlier, walked up.
Johnson bolted when they tried to arrest him. Hernandez shot him as he ran into a public park. The bullet that killed him went in his shoulder and out his eye socket.
Alvarez says the car's driver later told police that he'd heard Johnson cock a pistol in the back seat. The driver circled the block, and his passengers got out. Police stepped into a volatile scene, she said, and they reasonably believed that lives were at risk. She declined to charge Hernandez with a crime.
That stands in contrast to the police shooting of Laquan McDonald, also captured on video, which occurred eight days after Johnson was killed. Last week, Alvarez charged Officer Jason Van Dyke with first-degree murder in that case.
That video shows Van Dyke opening fire on McDonald, who is trotting away from police officers, waving a pocket knife. The officer fired 16 shots, 14 of them after McDonald had collapsed in the middle of Pulaski Road.
None of the seven other officers at the scene fired a shot. But they quickly closed ranks, and their official accounts of the shooting do not match the video, which was withheld from the public until a judge ordered it released, 13 months after McDonald died. The city has been in an uproar ever since. Federal prosecutors are investigating what appears to be a cover-up.
