Chicago cop free after posting $1.5 million bail in Laquan McDonald’s shooting

At bond court last week, prosecutors said Van Dyke opened fire six seconds after exiting his squad car as McDonald was holding a knife and walking in the middle of 41st Street and Pulaski Road shortly before 10 p.m. Oct. 20, 2014.

Van Dyke then fired 16 rounds at McDonald in about 14 seconds and was reloading when another officer told him to hold his fire, prosecutors said at bond court.

The one-page criminal complaint lodged against Van Dyke charged him with shooting McDonald “without legal justification and with the intent to kill or do great bodily harm.”

At the news conference, Alvarez said she had made her decision to charge Van Dyke “internally” weeks before the judge ordered the video released to the public. Witness interviews had been done over the past year, and “up until a week ago they were still interviewing people,” she said.

“It wasn’t going to be much longer, it really wasn’t,” Alvarez said. “I would say within a month.”

Alvarez said she has never seen anything like the shooting in her three decades in law enforcement. She called the video “graphic,” “violent” and “chilling” and said it “no doubt will tear at the hearts of all Chicagoans.”

“To watch a 17-year-old young man die in such a violent manner is deeply disturbing,” the prosecutor said.

Alvarez said several civilians witnessed the shooting. One motorist told authorities he never saw McDonald lunge at any officers or do anything else threatening before he was shot. McDonald also made no threatening motions while on the ground afterward, she said the motorist told authorities.

“The officer’s actions were not justified and were not a proper use of deadly force,” Alvarez told reporters.

The prosecutor defended taking a year to investigate the case, saying police shootings are “highly complex matters that carry with them very unique legal issues.”

According to details of the charges released in bond court Tuesday, Van Dyke was less than an hour into his overnight shift on the night of the shooting when a call came over the police radio at 9:47 p.m. of a citizen holding McDonald after he had been caught breaking into trucks and stealing radios in a parking lot near 41st and Kildare Avenue.

Another unit responded first and said over the radio that McDonald was walking away with a knife in his hand, Assistant State’s Attorney William Delaney said. At 9:56 p.m., a beat car reported that McDonald had “popped the tire on their squad car,” Delaney said.

The dash cam on the squad car that captured the incident showed McDonald jogging south on Pulaski past a Burger King. McDonald then passed another squad car and waved his right arm with a knife visible in his right hand, Delaney said.

At 9:57 p.m., McDonald can be seen in the video walking away from the officers near the center line of Pulaski Road. Van Dyke and his partner got out of their marked Chevrolet Tahoe with their guns drawn, and Van Dyke took at least one step toward the teen and opened fire from about 10 feet away, Delaney said.

“McDonald’s arm jerks and his whole body spins around and falls to the ground,” Delaney said.

Alvarez said the video showed McDonald lying on the ground while shots continued to strike his body and the pavement near him, with puffs of debris kicking up and his arms and body jerking as he was hit. Van Dyke’s partner told authorities there was a brief pause in the shots and he saw Van Dyke reloading, so he told Van Dyke to hold his fire so he could approach and disarm McDonald.

The video then showed Van Dyke’s partner walking up to McDonald and kicking the knife out of his hand, Alvarez said.

In all, Van Dyke was on the scene for less than 30 seconds before he started shooting, and the first shot was fired about six seconds after he exited his squad car, Alvarez said. About 14 or 15 seconds passed between the first and last shots fired by Van Dyke, and for 13 of those seconds, McDonald was on the ground, she said.

According to interviews with other officers at the scene, McDonald never spoke to them or responded to commands to drop the knife. Witnesses who were stopped in traffic on Pulaski told authorities that McDonald seemed to be “looking for a way to get away from the police,” Alvarez said.

“He never moved toward, lunged at or did anything threatening,” she said.

Police said McDonald, who had PCP in his system when he died, was behaving erratically and refusing police commands to drop a folding knife with a 3-inch blade. At the time of the shooting, the police union maintained that the officer fired in fear for his life because the teen lunged at him and his partner with the knife.

According to police and court records, Van Dyke joined the department in 2001 and spent more than four years with the targeted response unit — since disbanded by police Superintendent Garry McCarthy — that aggressively went into neighborhoods experiencing spikes in violent crime.

Van Dyke turned himself in to state’s attorney’s investigators at 7:41 a.m. Tuesday in their offices at the criminal courthouse at 26th Street and California Avenue, booking records show. As he arrived, Van Dyke kept his hands in his jeans pockets, looked straight ahead and did not answer questions from reporters as he walked briskly into the Leighton Criminal Court Building with his attorney.

Van Dyke’s prints were taken at 8:29 a.m., and he was placed in a one-person cell under close observation, records show. He was unarmed but brought along an inhaler he uses to treat his asthma, according to the records.

The case marks the first time a Chicago police officer has been charged with first-degree murder for an on-duty fatality in nearly 35 years. Van Dyke faces a minimum of 20 years in prison if convicted of first-degree murder.

The charge comes less than a week after a Cook County judge ordered the release of a video that Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration had long sought to keep out of public view. As the mayor urged prosecutors to conclude their investigation Nov. 23, he met with community leaders and aldermen to defend his handling of the controversy amid criticism that City Hall has not done enough to address police misconduct.

The city lost its court fight last week to keep the video under wraps when the judge ruled in favor of freelance journalist Brandon Smith, who sued under the state’s open records law.

Lawyers for McDonald’s family, who won a $5 million settlement from the city even before filing a lawsuit, have said none of the other officers at the scene fired a shot, according to city officials.

McDonald’s autopsy found he was shot once on each side of his chest and suffered single bullet wounds in the scalp and neck, two in his back, seven in his arms, one in his right hand and two in his right leg. According to the report, nine of the 16 entrance wounds had a downward or slightly downward trajectory.

The Tribune in April first revealed that Van Dyke was the officer who shot McDonald after city officials refused to disclose his identity, citing a provision in the union contract that bars the city from identifying officers unless they are convicted of a crime or the police board rules on their case. Police stripped him of his police powers and put him on paid desk duty pending the outcome of the investigation.