Chicago’s police review board released body camera video on Thursday of a police officer’s fatal shooting of Adam Toledo, a 13-year-old boy, late last month.
Toledo appears to have dropped a handgun and begun raising his hands less than a second before a police officer shot and killed him last month, the footage shows.
A still frame taken from Officer Eric Stillman’s jumpy nighttime body camera footage shows that Adam Toledo wasn’t holding anything and had his hands at least partially up when Stillman shot him in the chest at around 3 a.m. on March 29. Police, who were responding to reports of shots fired in the area, say the teen had a handgun on him before the shooting. And Stillman’s footage shows him shining a light on a handgun on the ground near Toledo after he shot him.
The newly released body camera video appears to show Adam running down an alley as the officer chasing him shouts “Police! Stop! Stop right f****** now.” Adam then appears slows down and stops. The officer can be heard saying, “Hands! Hands! Show me your f****** hands.” The video shows Adam turning toward the officer, and he appears to put his hands up.
Midway between repeating the command, the officer shoots Adam once, in the chest, and the teen drops to the ground.
While approaching the wounded Toledo, the officer radios in for an ambulance. He can be heard imploring the boy to “stay awake,” and as other officers arrive, the officer who apparently fired the shot says he can’t feel a heartbeat and begins administering CPR.
Other officers can be heard saying, “Stay with me, buddy,” “Stay awake, bud. Come on bud, stay awake,” and “Come on, big guy.”
The Civilian Office of Police Accountability, an independent board that investigates Chicago police shootings, released the footage of the March 29 fatal shooting after allowing the boy’s family to view it Tuesday.
The board initially said it couldn’t release the video because it involved the shooting of a minor, but it changed course after the mayor and police superintendent called for the video’s release.
Prior to the release of the video, Mayor Lori Lightfoot said that the city “failed Adam.”
“Simply put, we failed Adam, and we cannot afford to fail one more young person in our city,” Lightfoot said at a press conference prior to the release of the video. “No one should have a video broadcast widely of their child’s last moments, much less be placed in the terrible situation of losing their child in the first place.”
“We live in a city that is traumatized by a long history of police violence and misconduct,” the mayor said. “So while we don’t have enough information to be the judge and jury of this particular situation, it is certainly understandable why so many of our residents are feeling that all too familiar surge of outrage and pain. It is even clearer that trust between our community and law enforcement is far from healed and remains badly broken.”
Asked whether the video showed whether the teen fired on the officer, Lightfoot said she had seen no evidence that he had. She described watching the jumpy footage as “excruciating.”
“As a mom, this is not something you want children to see,” said the mayor. She declined to say if the footage showed whether the teen was holding a gun when he was shot, but she called a prosecutor’s assertion at a recent hearing that Toledo had a gun when he was shot ”correct.”
In addition to posting the officer’s body camera footage of the shooting, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, or COPA, released other investigation materials, including video captured by a third party, arrest reports and audio recordings of shots being fired in the area that led police to respond. The board didn’t say what the video shows or give any other information about the investigation.
The release comes in the wake of the traffic-stop shooting of Daunte Wright by a an officer in a Minneapolis suburb that has sparked protests as the broader Minneapolis area nervously awaits the outcome of the trial for Derek Chauvin, the first of four officers charged in George Floyd’s death.
Protests are planned in the city in the aftermath of the release of the video Thursday. Mayor Lightfoot urged the city’s residents to “proceed with deep empathy and calm, and most importantly, peace.”
In Chicago, police said officers responded to an area of the Little Village neighborhood on the city’s West Side after learning that gun shots had been detected in the area by a police-operated technology. The teen and a 21-year-old man fled on foot when confronted by police, and an officer shot the teen once in the chest following a foot chase during what the department described as an armed confrontation. Police said a handgun the boy had been carrying was recovered at the scene.
The review board declined to release all but the most basic details of what happened, leaving many questions unanswered, including whether or not the boy pointed the gun at the officer or fired on him before the officer shot him.
The name of the officer, who was placed on administrative leave per department policy in police-involved shootings, has also not been released.
Some details did emerge at a hearing for a 21-year-old man who authorities say was with Toledo the night he died, including prosecutors’ contention that the man fired the gun several times before officers arrived and had handed it to the teen.
Neither Mayor Lightfoot nor Superintendent David Brown has discussed the shooting in detail or suggested the officer did anything wrong.
But the video’s release comes at a time of inflamed tensions between police and the public. Besides the ongoing trial of Chauvin, the country has in recent days watched video of the fatal shooting of Wright, and a police officer in Virginia pepper-spraying a Black and Latino U.S. Army second lieutenant during another traffic stop.
The Chicago Police Department has a long history of brutality and racism that has fomented mistrust among the city’s many Black and Hispanic residents. Adding to that mistrust is the city’s history of suppressing damning police videos.
The city fought for months to keep the public from seeing the 2014 video of a white officer shoot a Black teenager, Laquan McDonald, 16 times, killing him. The officer was eventually convicted of murder. And the city tried to stop a TV news station from broadcasting video of a botched 2019 police raid in which an innocent, naked, Black woman wasn’t allowed to put on clothes until after she was handcuffed.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
