The man shot by a Chicago Police officer last month at the Grand Red Line station has filed a lawsuit against the city, the officer who shot him as well as that officer’s partner.
The suit was filed Wednesday by Ariel Roman, the unarmed man who was shot by CPD officer Melvina Bogard on Feb. 28 at the busy River North train station just before the start of Friday evening rush hour.
Bogard and her partner, Bernard Butler have been with the department since late 2017 and were assigned to the mass transit unit.
They have both been stripped of their police powers, and interim CPD Supt. Charlie Beck has asked the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office to review the shooting, which was captured on video by a passerby and circulated widely on social media.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot said the shooting was “extremely disturbing” and the officers’ actions were “deeply concerning.”
The city’s Law Department declined to comment because it hasn’t yet seen the complaint, a spokeswoman said.
The two officers saw Roman, 33, passing between cars on a Red Line train shortly after 4 p.m. Feb. 28.
Bogard, Butler and Roman got off the train at Grand. In the video, the two officers can be seen struggling to arrest Roman, who was trying to free himself and ignoring their commands to stop resisting.
Two deployed stun guns could be seen on the floor, and Bogard could be seen using pepper spray on the man while Butler tried to restrain him. Butler repeatedly tells Bogard to “shoot him.”
After Roman wriggled free and stood up, Bogard fired a shot. Roman ran up a set of stairs and Bogard fired again. Roman was hospitalized with gunshot wounds to his hip and buttocks.
The shooting happened just hours after Lightfoot and Beck had jointly launched a crackdown on CTA crime that called for adding 50 officers to the mass transit unit, assigning four detectives exclusively to solving CTA crimes and building a strategic deployment center specifically for mass transit.
