CHICAGO _ Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke was not justified in shooting Laquan McDonald once _ let alone 16 times _ as he walked down the street armed with a knife, an expert witness told jurors Thursday shortly before the prosecution rested its murder case.
The testimony by former FBI agent Urey Patrick bolstered the prosecution's position that there were other ways to apprehend the 17-year-old that night as McDonald distanced himself from officers on the scene.
The risk posed by McDonald "did not rise to the necessity of using deadly force to stop it," testified Patrick, who relied on the infamous shooting video to reach his conclusions.
"He never said anything to anybody, never made any threats, never made any move towards the police officers confronting him," said the expert on deadly use of force by police. "Here in this video he's walking away from them."
It marked a strong finish for the prosecution after sparring much of the previous day with the defense over which bullets killed the Chicago teen and how quickly he died.
Wrapping up their case on the fourth day of testimony _ more quickly than many anticipated _ prosecutors walked Cook County jurors moment by moment through the graphic video with Patrick and a second witness.
McDonald's mother, Tina Hunter, who attended the trial Thursday for the first time since testimony began this week, bowed her head while the video played multiple times, but she could still hear the witnesses narrating her son's death in detail. She began to quietly weep and buried her face in a tissue as the Rev. Jesse Jackson, sitting with the family, put his arm around her and gently rubbed her back.
Hunter, who has never spoken publicly about the shooting, left the Leighton Criminal Court Building without commenting.
Van Dyke, 40, is charged with two counts of first-degree murder, 16 counts of aggravated battery, and one count of official misconduct in McDonald's death. Prosecutors have argued that Van Dyke had no legal justification for opening fire because the teen posed no threat, but Van Dyke's attorneys have attempted to paint McDonald as an out-of-control, violent person who disobeyed police commands to drop the knife while high on PCP.
In the minutes before the shooting, other police officers had called for a Taser unit to help apprehend McDonald and tried to corral him with their squad cars. Patrick praised those efforts, telling the jury that the other officers responded in a manner reasonable to the risk posed by the teen.
"He is a risk. There's no question. He's been noncompliant, and he is armed with a knife. But there is nobody within reach of him, and he is moving away from the only people on the scene who could be imminently in reach of him," he said.
Even if McDonald posed an imminent threat at one point, that threat had ended by the time he had been shot and fell to the street, testified Patrick, who has testified as an expert witness across the country. In police-involved shootings, Patrick said, officers will continue shooting usually for a second or a second and a half before they are "capable of recognizing" that the threat has ended.
Prosecutors have previously established that McDonald fell to the pavement less than two seconds after he was first shot but that Van Dyke continued firing for about another 12 seconds, emptying his 16-shot semiautomatic gun.
"Mr. McDonald went down very suddenly, very hard," Patrick said. "He is at this point clearly incapacitated."
Despite an intense cross-examination by lead defense attorney Daniel Herbert, Patrick remained steadfast in his position that McDonald did not pose a threat that justified Van Dyke firing his gun.
Still, the defense may have gained some ground when Patrick, the author of a widely respected book on the use of force in policing, said the fact that other officers did not shoot had no bearing on whether Van Dyke himself was justified. Prosecutors frequently have reminded jurors that Van Dyke was the only one of 10 officers on the scene to shoot.
Herbert also suggested for the first time during his questioning that Van Dyke may have believed McDonald had a gun on him since he pulled his pants up at one point by the waistband, but Patrick said he didn't find that a reasonable conclusion given the video and radio traffic before the shooting. Indeed, Van Dyke never raised that concern with investigators after the shooting, according to previously released city records.
Before Patrick testified, an FBI ballistics expert helped shore up for the jury where and when the bullets from Van Dyke's gun were striking McDonald in the video taken from a police dashboard camera.
Since the video has no audio, the expert, Scott Patterson, told the jury he had to rely on visual cues to determine when each shot was fired. He said his analysis was further complicated by the flashing lights of the squad car behind Van Dyke that made it difficult to see muzzle flashes and the slide of Van Dyke's pistol kicking back indicating a shot.
Patterson, an FBI ballistics expert, testified that a slowed-down version of the video depicted several key moments, including Van Dyke's partner, Joseph Walsh, flinching and ducking as the first shot was fired, indicating that he "wasn't ready for a projectile to be fired."
He also noted the "plumes" of debris _ not "puffs of smoke" as some have said _ that were kicked up where bullets were hitting the roadway after McDonald fell, in some cases after passing through his body.
Patterson said the visual evidence shows that about 14 seconds passed between shots being fired by Van Dyke. McDonald fell to the pavement 1.6 seconds after the first bullet was fired, he said.
During Patterson's testimony, jurors were also shown a video of a "rate of fire" test conducted by the FBI that generally mirrored the conditions of McDonald's shooting. When that test shooter fired 16 bullets within 14 seconds from a distance of about 10 { feet _ as Van Dyke did _ it resulted in a "deliberate" and "methodical" rate of fire, Patterson said.
"He was taking his time to aim each shot," Patterson testified.
On cross-examination, Herbert tried to raise doubt in the jury's mind about the competence of Patterson's testimony. He noted not even Patterson could say from his analysis of the dashcam video that every bullet hit McDonald or where it struck.
The jury, though, heard Wednesday from Cook County's chief medical examiner that each of the 16 shots struck McDonald. They were also shown photos of 24 entrance and exit wounds on the teen's bullet-riddled body.
The prosecution ended its case by calling Chicago resident Jose Torres, the last of its 24 witnesses. Torres, who witnessed the shooting while driving his son, Xavier, to the hospital, testified he had an unobstructed view of McDonald as the teen walked down the street. His son gave similar testimony earlier in the week.
McDonald, the elder Torres told jurors, had his hands to his sides and was walking away from officers in the seconds before the shooting. The officers shouted at McDonald, who turned his head and looked at them before gunfire erupted, Torres said.
Torres testified that he heard more gunshots fired after McDonald had fallen to the street than when he was standing up. He wasn't sure how many bullets were fired, Torres said, but it was "enough to upset me."
" 'Why the f --- are they still shooting him when he was on the ground?' " he recalled himself asking out loud.
Torres stood his ground on cross-examination even as Randy Rueckert, one of Van Dyke's lawyers, suggested a squad car had pulled in front of his vehicle, blocking his view of the shooting.
"You're confusing me," Torres fired back after Rueckert peppered him with questions about how many police squads he saw that night and their direction of travel. "I don't understand what you're trying to get to."
"There was no other vehicle in my line of sight," he continued. "I had a clear view of Laquan McDonald."
Rueckert did not follow up with evidence to support the suggestion that Torres' view had been blocked and quickly ended his questioning.
Even though they were eyewitnesses to McDonald's killing , Torres and his son were shooed away from the scene by police and never gave a statement that night, the Chicago Tribune has previously reported.
Torres contacted the city agency that investigates police shootings after hearing news reports in which police claimed McDonald had lunged at officers with the knife. In an interview with the city's Office of Inspector General, Torres said he reached out because he had two sons close to McDonald's age and felt like justice was being subverted.
"I couldn't live with myself," Torres told investigators. "If something like that would happen to my kids, I would wish somebody would come forward and say something."
Jurors were not told about Torres' efforts to call city officials' attention to the shooting.
After the prosecution rested, Herbert argued outside the jurors' presence that the state hadn't met its burden of proof and asked Judge Vincent Gaughan to toss out the case entirely _ a routine request that is rarely granted.
The defense argued prosecutors had not proven anything about Van Dyke's state of mind when he shot, and regardless, the officer's gunfire was legal since McDonald was fleeing a lawful arrest. Prosecutors countered by saying it was clear Van Dyke knew he could cause harm to McDonald when he fired his weapon.
"The defendant was not justified in firing any of the 16 rounds," prosecutor Joseph Cullen said. "Each time he fired, it became even less necessary."
Gaughan swiftly denied the defense's request.
After Gaughan announced his decision, Van Dyke's wife, Tiffany, began crying in the courtroom. Van Dyke, who had been smiling after court recessed for the day, saw her weeping and walked into the gallery to comfort her. He was heard explaining to her that it's very rare for judges to acquit defendants in the middle of a trial and the ruling was not an indication of the jury's eventual verdict.
The couple, both wearing bulletproof vests, left the courthouse a few minutes later holding hands.
Van Dyke's attorneys will begin presenting their self-defense case Monday.
