The police department ultimately ruled the death as justifiable homicide, but later charged Van Dyke with first-degree murder as the video of the incident was about to be released, more than a month later.
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Chicago police officers who watched one of their own shoot a black teenager 16 times filed reports depicting a version of events that contrasted sharply with what was captured on the dashcam footage that has sparked protests and cost the police commissioner his job.
Van Dyke was the only officer to shoot and fired 13 of the 16 shots at McDonald while the teenager was lying on the ground, the report says.
The reports by various police officers who were at the scene of the shooting in the third-largest city in the USA are compelling because their descriptions of what happened do not match police vehicle video footage.
The reports, a collection of handwritten statements from the night of the shooting, and follow-up reports in the days and months after, often refer to Van Dyke as VD and call him the victim. “VD continued firing. O appeared to be attempting to get up, still holding the knife, pointing at VD”. “McDonald fell to the ground but continued to move and continued to grasp the knife, refusing to let go of it”. What could cause a police officer to value a life so little that he would murder a teenager who was simply walking past him? Van Dyke told an investigator that McDonald was swinging the knife in an aggressive, exaggerated manner and that McDonald raised the knife across the chest and pointed it at Van Dyke, according to one police report. Included in the reports is a December 2012 bulletin about the knife, attributed to an unnamed “Midwest intelligence organization” that warned officers to “remain cognizant of its threat to personal safety”.
Dashcam videos released by the city after months of legal wrangling appears to contradict those statements.
You can read the rest of the 395-page police report here.
Officer Dora Fontaine said she saw McDonald “raised his right arm toward Officer Van Dyke, as if attacking Van Dyke”.
The city of Chicago has responded as well, paying the McDonald family a $5 million settlement even before a wrongful death lawsuit was filed. Release of the video has led to a torrent of protest and criticism over the way Emanuel and his police department handled the investigation into the shooting. The authority has not released its report on the McDonald shooting.
The dashcam video of the shooting, however, shows a different side of the story.
Requests for comment to representatives for Emanuel, Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and the police review authority weren’t immediately returned. Protesters also claim that police and prosecutors tried to cover up McDonald’s death by deleting 86-minutes of video footage from a nearby Burger King security camera. One report said McDonald showed “irrational behavior”, such as ignoring verbal directions, “growling” and making noises. PCP, a hallucinogenic drug, was found in McDonald’s system, according to Alvarez and the medical examiner’s report that was among the documents.
Now hundreds of pages of Chicago police reports obtained by the Chicago Tribune show that police may have lied other times about the killing.
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Redactions in the police reports cover signatures, a reporter’s cellphone number, the serial number of the officer’s gun and McDonald’s address.
