Wednesday night, Bolingbrook police released video footage showing O’Neal carrying a backpack, and other men with stolen cars, including a Buick, at a Speedway gas station. It was unclear what the video would show.
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The moment of the fatal shooting isn’t seen on any of the videos released Friday because the officer’s body camera was not recording at the time, police said.
There is footage, however, of police handcuffing O’Neal’s lifeless body and cursing at him after he was shot, at one point pushing his head into the ground.
One policeman in the profanity-laden clip calls the slain teenager a “motherf–er” as another searches his backpack.
“We watched that video of Paul O’Neal being shot to death by a Chicago police officer and then we have a superintendent who believes that that’s justified”, one protester said.
The medical examiner’s office said O’Neal died of a gunshot wound to the back.
Another officer asks moments later: “They shot at us, too?” He’s chased by several officers.
Michael Oppenheimer, an attorney representing O’Neal’s family, claims the videos are proof of egregious police misconduct of not outright murder. “No, the shots were coming at us when the auto was coming at us”, the officer said before describing how he ended up in the backyard chasing O’Neal on foot. “It was very hard for me to watch this video as well”.
She said that her brother had graduated from high school and was planing to get technical training at a community college. After ramming a police cruiser and then trying to flee on foot, O’Neal was shot in the back by a police officer shortly after hopping a fence into the backyard of a house. Another officer who apparently fired his weapon laments that he was going to be on “desk duty for 30 (expletive) days now”. Motherfucker!” Later, the first officer says, “Man, this is so fucked-up, man.
O’Neal’s mother, Tanisha Gibson, filed a federal wrongful death lawsuit against the Chicago PD on Monday, accusing the officers of shooting her son “without legal justification”, the Chicago Tribune reported.
“My promise to the people of Chicago is that we will be guided by the facts and should wrongdoing be discovered; individuals will be held accountable for their actions”, Johnson said in a statement Friday.
Johnson broke with tradition by saying police appeared to have violated departmental policy in the O’Neal case. It starts with one officer jumping out of his patrol auto as another vehicle speeds past – a stolen black Jaguar allegedly being driven by the teenager. This policy was the result of the controversy surrounding the police and city handling of the death of Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times by police. Police said the officer who killed O’Neal did not have a working body camera, according to ABC 7. It may have been a malfunction from the body cam the officer was wearing or something more deliberate, but an investigation by the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) – the agency that looks into situations like this – is ongoing.
He was shot by one of the pursuing officers in a nearby backyard, after being told to put his hands up. The Camera Cutoff Is A Cover-Up. This all takes place in a residential neighborhood. But this was a vehicle.
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Activist Ja’Mal Green is working with the family and says this killing undermines the effort to fix the relationship between the police department and the black community.
