Laquan’s parents were awarded a $5 million settlement from the City of Chicago for his murder.
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What’s known is he has two children – 9 and 14 – and a wife, Tiffany. According to Rahm Emanual, Chicago’s mayor: “We hold our police officers to high standards and obviously in this case Jason Van Dyke violated … basic moral standards that bind our community together”. Now, there is newly-obtained video recorded from inside Van Dyke’s SUV recorded by his dashcam.
All told, the videos show at least eight police vehicles responding to the shooting scene, and now the Emanuel administration has released videos from five of those vehicles.
Prosecutors have charged Officer Jason Van Dyke with first-degree murder for the death last year of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, who was shot 16 times.
The autopsy in fact showed that he had been shot 16 times-as Van Dyke unloaded his service weapon, execution style-while McDonald lay on the ground. McDonald was about 10 feet away when he opened fire.
The Independent Police Review Board dismissed the complaint because there were “no independent witnesses” and “no way to determine” the cause of Nance’s injuries, the Sun-Times reported. Several other officers were at the scene, and none fired any shots.
Van Dyke’s lawyer, Daniel Herbert, told CNN that the video was not an indicator of his client’s guilt. “It distorts images. So what appears to be clear on a video sometimes is not always that clear”, he said. The database, a collaboration between the Invisible Institute and the University of Chicago Law School’s Mandel Legal Aid Clinic, is not comprehensive and represents only three data sets spanning 2002 to 2008 and 2011 to 2015.
He says his research also shows that from 2005 until the end of 2014, 47 non-federal, sworn law enforcement officers – police officers, deputy sheriffs and state troopers – were charged with murder or manslaughter resulting from a fatal on-duty shooting.
However, he is still among the “small subset” of officers responsible for a “disproportionate” number of complaints.
Van Dyke, 37, denied every allegation.
Five complaints in the database were “not sustained”, five were unfounded, four resulted in exoneration, five had unknown outcomes and one resulted in no action taken. At one point, demonstrators paused along the way, joining hands to pray together. The squad auto slowly drives next to him. The auto was impounded after Clark was arrested for possession of marijuana. They also want the Department of Justice to investigate. “He shouldn’t have been on the street in the first place after my incident”. “It makes me feel like it could have been me”.
Wednesday night, some protestors shouted at police, but overall it was peaceful.
A group of between 100 and 200 protesters began a march at the start of the evening rush-hour in Chicago’s busy downtown area on Wednesday, and were still on the streets more than five hours later despite the onset of rain.
The local FOP also directed visitors to its website to a GoFundMe webpage set up by Van Dyke’s wife.
“We want McCarthy gone”.
The Black Lives Matter activists called the attack “an act of domestic terrorism” by “white supremacists” and took to the streets again on Tuesday to show they were not intimidated. Its terms and conditions state the site can not be used to raise money for “the defense or support of anyone alleged to be involved in criminal activity”. Van Dyke, he said, “truly was in fear for his life as well as the lives of his fellow police officers”. His death was less widely publicised, partly because investigators in Chicago had sought to delay release of the video, which was filmed from the dashboard of another police auto.
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Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton says the family of a black teen fatally shot by a white Chicago police officer and residents in the city “deserve justice and accountability”.
