The State’s Attorney’s Office gave a power point presentation and showed the dashboard camera video of a white police officer shooting and killing Ronald Johnson, 25, the second such video to be released in two weeks.
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Hernandez fired five shots striking Johnson twice: once in the back of the knee and again in the shoulder, which exited through his eye.
Alvarez said that while her office would prefer audio on the dashcam video, it was a problem for the Chicago Police Department to address. Johnson fled officers and ignored commands by multiple officers to drop his weapon.
The man was taken in critical condition to Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and the woman was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center in good condition. The video does not show that but she attributes that to the inferior quality of the video. Hernandez can be seen in the video firing at Johnson as he fled from the responding officers. Police arriving on the scene saw Johnson allegedly with a gun in his hand. Instead, he ran from the scene, she said. The recovered weapon was linked to a prior shooting in Chicago, where no one had been arrested and no weapon had been recovered, the state’s attorney’s office added. They named Officer George Hernandez as the officer who fired the shots. “He acted in the reasonable belief that he was acting in self-defense, and he did what he had to do”. In the Johnson case, Mayor Rahm Emanuel reversed the city’s decision to keep the footage private and ordered its release.
Johnson’s mother, Dorothy Holmes, has sued the city and Officer Hernandez, claiming the dashboard camera video shows Johnson never pointed a weapon at police, and was not an imminent threat to officers when he was shot on October 12, 2014.
Alvarez rejected that theory saying the video shows Johnson had a gun and police officers said over the radio that they had found a gun a little more than a minute after the shooting.
Johnson had left a party with three other people when someone opened fire on their vehicle, so they eventually parked and got out of the auto, Alvarez said. A similar investigation by the Justice Department into the Police Department in Ferguson, Missouri, after the deadly police shooting death past year of an unarmed black teenager, led to a searing report showing numerous abuses by the department.
Amid the fallout over the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald, activists and family members of another young African American killed by a Chicago officer are asking for an investigation.
“I couldn’t believe that this man is shooting my son”, she said.
On Monday, Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced that the Justice Department will begin a far-ranging investigation into the patterns and practices of the Chicago Police Department, largely as a result of the fallout over the McDonald case.
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The officer who shot and killed Ronald “Ronnieman” Johnson the week before Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times will not be charged criminally for the shooting.
