Above Photo: The release of the video showing former police Jason Van Dyke killing Laquan McDonald sparked public outrage. AFP.
Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke is accused of helping his fellow cops avoid justice over the killing of a 23-year-old janitor.
The white police officer charged with murder for shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald is also involved in a possible police cover-up in the brutal police killing of Emmanuel Lopez in 2005, court records reveal.
Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke made no attempt to conduct an independent inquiry into the police killing of Lopez, reported the Chicago Tribune, citing records released as part of an ongoing court case against the city.
Van Dyke, who was assigned to write the “general offense case report” at the murder scene, admitted he simply copied the report from the other officers to make sure it matched their version of the events leading up to their shooting the 23-year-old janitor 16 times.
The Lopez family filed a lawsuit against the Chicago police department, claiming there was no justification for the killing and that the police made up a story about self-defense. The suit goes to trial in February.
Van Dyke’s actions “show the effort the Chicago Police Department will go to in order to cover up police misconduct,” Terry Ekl, Lopez family’s lawyer, told the Tribune. “They were trying to keep a lid on how this shooting took place and to concoct a defense for shooting an unarmed guy 16 times.”
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Van Dyke was arrested last Tuesday after prosecutors charged him for the 2014 killing of McDonald, whom he shot 16 times even though he posed no threat. He walked out of jail days later after paying a US$1.5-million bail, despite his facing first-degree murder charges for killing Laquan McDonald in another case of an alleged police cover-up.
Footage from a police dashcam, withheld from the public for over a year and released last week, showed that Van Dyke fired on McDonald and continued to do so after his body laid lifeless on the ground.
The video has sparked outrage in Chicago as the case connects to a larger story of impunity in the United States for police who kill people of color. Protests in Chicago led to the firing of the Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy on Tuesday.