Jan. 08--There were signs for nearly a year that Quintonio LeGrier appeared to be on a downward spiral.
In the months before he was fatally shot by a Chicago police officer after allegedly swinging a bat at him, records show the teen had become so familiar a figure to Northern Illinois University police for his increasingly erratic and bizarre behavior that at least two officers knew him by his first name, according to police reports obtained by the Tribune.
There was a dorm fight in March that left the NIU sophomore with a badly swollen eye. The 19-year-old was arrested and charged with a misdemeanor when he refused to talk to a cop who was questioning him, saying, "I didn't see nothing, I didn't do nothing, I don't know nothing," the reports show. Then in May, LeGrier alarmed other students when he shouted profanities in the dorm cafeteria and struck a female employee in the chest when she asked for his student ID.
"Do you know who I am?" an officer quoted LeGrier as saying when he tried to arrest him for battery. "I am God."
One night on campus in September, LeGrier allegedly stared down and chased a female student, who later told police she feared he was going to beat or rape her. Two officers, both of whom shouted to LeGrier by name, drew their guns on him, saying they feared he might be armed after spotting him holding a black object, the reports show. But he had only a cellphone, police said.
As officers awaited medics, police said, LeGrier repeatedly shouted, "I am God!" and "I am in outer space!"
After that encounter, authorities involuntarily admitted LeGrier to a DeKalb hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, records show.
It was evidence of continuing erratic behavior for the teen who, despite a traumatic early childhood, had made strides with the help of a caring foster mother and become an honor student at Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy in Chicago.
Just three months later, LeGrier had a final confrontation -- this time with Chicago police during Christmas break when he allegedly brandished a baseball bat at an officer responding to what has been described as a domestic dispute. He and a neighbor -- Bettie Jones, a 55-year-old grandmother -- were fatally shot. Police said Jones' death was accidental. The officer told investigators he never saw Jones, a law enforcement source has told the Tribune.
In an interview, LeGrier's mother, Janet Cooksey, said her son told her on Christmas Day that he wouldn't return to NIU after the break. Cooksey said she got angry with her only child and took him to stay with his father at his West Side home that same day.
That's where the deadly confrontation took place early the next morning. His father had called 911 saying he was afraid his son was trying to hurt him.
LeGrier was briefly banned from campus after the September incident and faced possible discipline from NIU, including his ouster from student housing, a university spokesman said. The university required he undergo counseling. It was unclear how long his psychiatric hospitalization lasted.
A review of the police reports and juvenile court records as well as interviews with LeGrier's friends and family portray an intelligent teen who wanted success but whose behavior drastically changed last year.
"He was depressed. ... He was going through something. I did notice a big difference," Cooksey said. "I asked them to test him for drugs because I noticed myself that he wasn't the same person."
Whitney Cain, a 20-year-old sophomore majoring in public health at NIU, said she had been close friends with LeGrier since their freshman year.
"He would be like kind of angry a lot," she said of the final months of his life. "He wasn't violent, but he would be a little more angry when things didn't go his way. He felt like nobody treated him like he thought they should. People would laugh at him, and he lost a lot of friends because of how he was acting, so he felt like nobody was there for him."
Last fall, LeGrier had sat for an entire hour with his fist raised at a dorm council meeting while wearing a handmade sign taped to his chest that "said something about being a real man," a dorm adviser told campus police last year, according to a police report. The adviser told police she felt LeGrier's mental state was deteriorating but saw no signs he posed a danger to himself or others, the report said.
His mother and Cain said LeGrier often said "I'm God" as almost a catchphrase and insisted it wasn't a sign of mental illness.
