Prosecutors argued that, given the circumstances of this violent shooting, Van Dyke should be held without bail.
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Van Dyke emptied his clip, and was reloading when his partner asked him to stop shooting so the partner could kick the knife out of McDonald’s hand. Anita Alvarez, state’s attorney for Cook County, said the investigation revealed that the footage had not been altered.
“I felt compelled in the interest of public safety to announce these state charges today”, she said Tuesday at a news conference. In it, McDonald is shot 16 times by Van Dyke – less than 10 seconds after he exited his squad vehicle. But compare that to the Cincinnati case last summer in which black driver Samuel DuBose was fatally shot on camera by University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing during a routine traffic stop.
“I’m 56 years old”, McCarthy said. She called the video “graphic”, “violent” and “chilling” and said it “no doubt will tear at the hearts of all Chicagoans”. “And certainly the life of a 17-year-old young man, ‘” Brooks told CNN.
Alvarez responded, “That’s all I’m going to say on this”.
“I didn’t have the authority to do what people thought I should do in this case, by law”, he said.
However, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) didn’t consider Dean as a real threat, since he doesn’t have the guns to carry out his plan, federal prosecutors said in court according to The Chicago Tribune.
Officer Jason Van Dyke had been in jail since Tuesday after prosecutors charged him with the October 20, 2014, shooting of Laquan McDonald.
Chicago police cars are set up so audio records along with video, police have said.
An autopsy showed McDonald had wounds in the scalp, neck, chest, left elbow, both arms, and his back, and only two of the wounds-to the lower back and upper leg- could be “definitively linked” to the seconds when McDonald was standing.
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 had been placed on paid desk duty after the shooting a year ago.
But a fellow user of the unidentified social media forum where the message was posted had already taken a screen shot of the threat and showed it to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Garry McCarthy blamed the missing files on technical difficulties. None of the five other officers at the scene fired their weapons.
“The public trust in the leadership of the department has been shaken and eroded”, Mayor Rahm Emanuel told reporters on Tuesday (local time). The charges come after a year of protests and debate over police force, police killings, and racial profiling. This is consistent with national figures: The Washington Post found in April that only 54 officers had been charged, out of thousands of police shootings that had taken place since 2005.
Another protester, Jedidiah Brown, an activist from the city’s South Side who is black, said that Van Dyke’s release sends the wrong message to Chicago.
A former government civil rights lawyer, Mr Patrick said he hoped to help restore the community’s confidence in the police and rebuild the system of accountability. But the alderman remains disturbed that it wasn’t shown to council members or the public until a judge’s order forced its release just last week.
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Brookins Jr. was prepared to vote in favor of a $5 million settlement for the family of Laquan McDonald. Nine of the 16 entrance wounds had a downward trajectory.
