Ex-officer gets 7 years in death of black teen
Chicago shooting called ‘a tragedy on both sides’ by judge
CHICAGO — Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago police officer who fired 16 deadly shots into Laquan McDonald more than four years ago, was sentenced Friday to just shy of seven years in an Illinois prison, providing a measure of finality in a case that laid bare this city’s racial divisions and led to an overhaul of its long-troubled Police Department.
“This is not pleasant, and this is not easy,” said Judge Vincent Gaughan of the Cook County Circuit Court, who announced the sentence. “This is a tragedy for both sides.”
Jurors convicted Van Dyke in October of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm, one for each bullet he fired. Prosecutors asked Gaughan to sentence him to at least 18 years in prison. Van Dyke’s lawyers suggested probation.
Just before learning his sentence of 81 months, Van Dyke rose and read a short statement.
“The last thing I ever wanted to do … was to shoot Laquan McDonald,” said Van Dyke, who spoke softly and read from a piece of paper. “People have the right to judge my actions, however no one knows what I was thinking in that critical moment.”
Van Dyke, who is white, and McDonald, who was black and 17, came to personify the decades of tension between Chicago police and the city’s African-American residents. Last year’s trial was seen by many Chicagoans as a referendum on whether officers could be held accountable for taking a life. Nervous crowds gathered across the city to listen to the verdict and broke out into chants of “Justice for Laquan!” when the court clerk read out “guilty” over and over.
McDonald’s death Oct. 20, 2014, at first stirred little public outcry and only cursory media coverage. That changed more than a year later when Van Dyke, 40, was charged with murder and when police dash camera video was released showing McDonald, who was carrying a knife, veering away from police before crumpling to the street as the gunshots started.
Protesters marched repeatedly in the weeks that followed, forcing out the Chicago police superintendent, successfully pushing for policy changes and weakening Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose administration had fought to keep the video out of public view.
More than four years after McDonald’s death, the case continues to shape policing and politics in Chicago. The Police Department agreed last year to a courtenforced consent decree after a federal investigation found a pattern of discrimination. Emanuel, a Democrat whose term ends this year, announced on the eve of Van Dyke’s trial that he would not seek re-election. And Thursday, three Chicago officers charged with conspiring to cover up the circumstances of McDonald’s death were acquitted in a separate trial, leading some activists to lament a police “code of silence” that Emanuel has acknowledged to be pervasive.
“We cannot improve the safety of our communities if our police force is not held accountable for its actions and the very real culture of the code of silence goes unpunished,” Toni Preckwinkle, a leading candidate in a large field of mayoral hopefuls, said in a statement after Thursday’s verdicts.
At Van Dyke’s trial, prosecutors played the dash camera video for jurors over and over. They showed gruesome autopsy photographs. They emphasized Van Dyke was the only officer to fire his gun.
“It wasn’t the knife in Laquan’s hand that made the defendant kill him that night,” a prosecutor, Jody Gleason, said during closing arguments. “It was his indifference to the value of Laquan’s life.”
A longtime officer who had never been involved in a shooting before, Van Dyke testified in his own defense, growing emotional at times and insisting he acted as he was trained.
“I just kept on looking at that knife and I shot at it,” he told jurors, who were unswayed.