Officers charged in killing probe’s wake

CHICAGO — Three police officers were charged Tuesday with conspiracy, official misconduct and obstruction of justice in connection with the investigation that followed the death of Laquan McDonald, a black teenager fatally shot by a white Chicago police officer in 2014.

The three officers are accused of conspiring in the hours and days after the shooting to “conceal the true facts” to protect Jason Van Dyke, a fellow officer, who fired 16 times at McDonald, who was 17.

Named in the indictment were Detective David March and officers Joseph Walsh and Thomas Gaffney.

Van Dyke, who was charged with murder in the shooting, was the only one to fire a weapon the night McDonald died in 2014. Van Dyke has pleaded innocent, saying he feared for his life.

Other officers — including the three now charged with crimes — backed up Van Dyke’s account of what happened that night: that McDonald had moved menacingly toward him with a knife. The dashboard video, however, contradicted those accounts, showing McDonald, who was clutching a knife, seeming to veer away from the police when Van Dyke began firing.

The dashboard video set off nights of demonstrations across Chicago, followed by the removal of the city’s police superintendent and a broad investigation by the Justice Department into the Chicago Police Department.