CHICAGO – Yet another unarmed black teenager's shooting death at the hands of Chicago cops has been discovered as being covered up for over three years, the New York Times wrote Thursday.
The latest set of videos — with views from at least four surveillance cameras — provides a distant, and somewhat incomplete, view of the brief moments on Jan. 7, 2013, after the police confronted Cedrick Chatman, a 17-year-old black youth, in a car at a busy South Side intersection.
He was carrying an iPhone box, not a gun:
According to a report from the Independent Police Review Authority, which examines police shootings here and recommends discipline, one officer said he saw a dark gray or black object in Mr. Chatman’s hand and thought it was a gun. Fearing for his life and that of his partner, the officer, identified in court documents as Kevin Fry, told the authority that he fired his weapon four times. The dark object turned out to be an iPhone box.
The Chatman family is suing the city for wrongful death. The video came to light when a judge ordered its release Thursday:
“I went to a lot of trouble to decide this issue,” said Judge Gettleman, who added that he was frustrated to receive a motion late Wednesday from the city reversing its position and suggesting a new state of “enlightenment” on transparency.
The latest video via the New York Times:
