Video contradicts police account of shooting

CHICAGO — Surveillance video shows an off-duty Chicago police officer shooting and wounding an unarmed autistic black man, contradicting an initial police description of an armed confrontation and echoing devastating dashcam video evidence against a white Chicago officer in an unrelated case who claimed that Laquan McDonald tried to stab him before he fatally shot the black teen.

The grainy video from a security camera on a South Side home was released Tuesday by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability and shows Sgt. Khalil Muhammad shooting 18-year-old Ricardo Hayes around 5 a.m. on Aug. 13, 2017.

Before the shooting, Hayes can be seen running along the sidewalk and then stopping. Muhammed pulls alongside, with parked cars between them. Hayes takes a few steps toward him, and Muhammed shoots the teen in the arm and chest. Hayes turns and runs, despite his wounds.

A lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, and another on behalf of Hayes and his family, say his caretaker had called police to say that Hayes had wandered away from home and has developmental disabilities.

“As a black teenager with disabilities, Ricky was at a heightened risk for police violence,” Karen Sheley of the ACLU of Illinois said in a statement.

“Thankfully, he survived — but he should never have been shot.”

At the time, police officials described the incident as an armed confrontation, mirroring statements by officers after the fatal shooting of the 17-year-old McDonald in November 2014. Jason Van Dyke was convicted this month of second-degree murder and aggravated battery in the slaying. Despite video evidence to the contrary, Van Dyke and other officers on the scene claimed that McDonald was acting aggressively before the shooting. Van Dyke said the teenager lunged at him with a pocket knife.

The sergeant’s call to 911 after he shot Hayes in the summer of 2017 was among the audio files released this week.

“The guy, like, he was about to pull a gun. Walked up to the car, and I had to shoot,” Muhammad told a Chicago Fire Department dispatcher. But according to the lawsuit filed by Hayes and his family, the teen “was standing almost perfectly still, facing Officer Muhammad’s truck, with his hands at his sides” when he was shot.

And, said Sheley, “the video shows both that there was no justification for the officer to shoot him and that initial stories told by CPD officials about the shooting — that the ‘encounter escalated’ — were false.”

Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson later said that Hayes had no weapon and, on Wednesday, department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said Johnson will be asking Muhammad why he opened fire from inside his SUV — something that officers are trained to do only if there is an imminent threat.

The Cook County state’s attorney’s office decided to not prosecute the sergeant, COPA spokesman Ephraim Eaddy said Wednesday.