Chicago cops in fatal shoot lose badges
spond to requests for comment.
A woman who answered the door at George’s Queens home on Friday said he was not home.
“It’s been 22 years,” said the woman who identified herself as a relative. “What’s there to say?”
Heyward said George has never apologized for shooting his son. But the two had an awkward encounter less than a year after Nicholas’ death.
“I was driving in the neighborhood and I saw two cops at a scene with a firetruck,” Heyward recalled. “I thought one of them looked like George.” He parked the car and approached the officers. “I was getting nervous and shaking,” Heyward said. “This guy murdered my son and he’s still in this community?” George did not respond and Heyward was pulled away by friends who feared the encounter would turn ugly. Heyward and Nicholas’ mother, Angela, divorced. Their younger son, Quentin, moved to Georgia to get away from the neighborhood and harassment from police, his father said. The 26-year-old has a successful career as a chef.
Heyward has bonded with the parents of other victims of police shootings and participating in protests and rallies. The 2014 shooting death of Akai Gurley in the stairwell of another city housing project hit close to home. Authorities said Officer Peter Liang’s weapon discharged while he conducted a vertical patrol, fatally striking Gurley.
Angela Grant Heyward is still haunted by the memory of telling Quentin his big brother was gone.
“I will never forget his cries, his screams, for the rest of my life,” she said. “Sometimes I think it was a nightmare and I’m going to wake up. And I look at his picture. And I still question why.” AN UNARMED black teen who was shot dead by cops while driving a stolen car was hit in the back, according to autopsy results released Saturday.
Three Chicago police officers have been stripped of their badges in connection with the death of 18-year-old Paul O’Neal — another questionable police shooting in a city roiled by confrontations between cops and young black men.
The Chicago police department pledged to “conduct a thorough and fact based administrative review” to determine whether the unidentified officers violated policy when they fired into a stolen Jaguar driven by O’Neal.
Police stopped the stolen convertible Thursday evening in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood and were getting out of their cruisers when O’Neal attempted to flee in the luxury car. Authorities said the teen suspect sideswiped one of the police cars and another parked car and injured some of the officers, whose wounds were not life-threatening.
As the convertible jetted away, three officers fired their guns, striking O’Neal. No gun was found on O’Neal or inside the car.
“Given what is known thus far, it appears that departmental policies may have been violated by at least two of the police officers,” police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi wrote in an email to the Chicago Tribune on Friday night.
The policy in question bars officers from “firing at or into a moving vehicle when the vehicle is the only force used against the sworn member or another person.”
While O’Neal was unarmed, the officers could still be protected by another Chicago police policy that says cops “will not unreasonably endanger themselves or another person to conform to the restrictions of this directive,” meaning they may have had the right to defend themselves from the recklessly driving teen.
Two of the officers were sanctioned Friday. The third was disciplined Saturday after the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled O’Neal’s death a homicide.
The Chicago police department is handling the investigation into the shooting with a transparency not seen in other police shootings it has probed. The maligned department came under scrutiny after it waited more than a year to release police video showing black teenager Laquan McDonald getting shot 16 times by a police officer.
Activists and a group of O’Neal’s friends and family held a candlelight vigil for the slain teen near the scene of the shooting Friday night. “I lost my little cousin to police officers,” O’Neal’s cousin Zhivago Short, 20, said, according to the Chicago Tribune. “What are y’all going to do about it?”