Chicago officer says detective falsified her report on shooting
CHICAGO — Chicago Police Officer Dora Fontaine says she was horrified on seeing statements that the detective investigating Laquan McDonald’s death had attributed to her.
She maintains she never told him the 17-year-old McDonald raised his arm, moving to attack Officer Jason Van Dyke with a knife.
That denial contradicted the shooting’s long-held narrative and eventually helped prosecutors build a case against three officers accused of conspiring to cover up the circumstances of the knife-wielding McDonald’s fatal shooting by Van Dyke.
It also made her an outcast among her colleagues, Fontaine said Wednesday as her testimony at the trial of three former or current colleagues went until almost 8 p.m.
Some called her a rat, a traitor and a snitch, she said, and implied they wouldn’t back her up on the street. The situation became so fraught, her supervisors pulled her from patrol and assigned her to paid desk duty.
“If I was at a call and I needed assistance, some officers felt strong enough to say that I didn’t deserve to be helped,” she testified.
Wearing her police uniform and occasionally speaking in a defiant voice, Fontaine testified that Detective David March attributed fabricated statements to her in police reports that justified Van Dyke shooting the black teen 16 times.
Fontaine then underwent a withering, 11⁄2-hour cross-examination by March’s lawyer in which she acknowledged her beef with the detective concerned a single sentence in a police report.
March’s attorney, James McKay, also went on at length about the conflicting accounts given by Fontaine to various investigators.
March is charged with official misconduct, obstruction of justice and conspiracy for allegedly lying to exaggerate the threat posed by McDonald. Former Officer Joseph Walsh, who was Van Dyke’s partner, and Officer Thomas Gaffney, who was among the first to encounter McDonald that night, are also on trial on the same charges.
Prosecutors allege the three defendants conspired to conceal what happened the night of the shooting in order to shield Van Dyke from scrutiny.