Laquan McDonald Murder Case

Laquan McDonald Murder Case

Crime in Chicago has been the talk of the city for more than a decade now. According to the statistics, among all the states in the United States, Chicago’s murder rate has been on top for more than five years consecutively (Pavlick et al, Pg. 1019). Apparently, homicides top the list of murders. For instance, the late Laquan McDonald is a victim of a police shooting crime that happened in 2014 in Chicago. Laquan was a black teen under the care of his legal guardian, Goldie Hunter. Laquan’s death shows how black teens suffer under oppression from the white policemen due to their racial background. Moreover, it highlights how teenagers are suffering from drug abuse which later indulges them in crime unintentionally. Gutowski & Jeremy (Pg. 2) affirm that Mr. McDonald was a jobless African-American teenager aged 17 years addicted to drugs.

After a detailed investigation the suspect, Officer Jason Van Dyke was found to be responsible after a police dashboard camera showed him doing the act. Mr. Dyke was working for the Chicago Police Department (CPD) since late ’90s until the incidence happened when he was 36 years old. Moreover, he is married and has 2 children. After the incidence happened, investigations started two weeks later led David March from the Chicago police, General Lisa Madigan-the state’s attorney, U.S. justice department and the FBI (Taylor, Pg.2). The investigations were precise since it oversighted the brutality of some policemen. Also, it shed a light of what transpired on that night through video footages from different buildings, something which led to the conviction of Mr. Dyke. They were done by visitation of the crime scene with crime experts, and questioning several witnesses.

Pursuing this further, on 20th October 2014, the CPD received a radio call that a citizen was breaking into trucks and stealing radios in a parking near the 41st street and was armed with a knife. Immediately, Mr. Dyke and his men responded to the alarm and confirmed it within minutes. According to Taylor (Pg.2), Mr. Dyke pulled over and walked towards McDonald who was heading in the opposite direction. Within no time, Mr. Dyke shot McDonald and his body fell to the ground spinning. Mr. Dyke walked towards his body and shot hm again to a total of 16 bullets.

In addition, the major evidence provided to the court was that of a video of the police patrol car dashboard camera which showed detailed information of what transpired on that night. The police department confiscated the video for a long time until the interested parties took the matter to the court for its release (Gutowski & Jeremy, Pg. 3). After a couple of months, their efforts bore fruits and the video was released although the audio was tempered with. The video was analyzed by high-end video experts from the prosecutor’s side. Significantly, this was a major breakthrough in the case since it highlighted the full incidence.

In the light of the murder case, the Chicago City Council approved $5 million as a settlement of the McDonalds family (Gutowski & Jeremy, Pg. 1). A trial began a year later after the dramatic shooting on 24th November 2015 where Mr. Dyke was charged with first-degree murder and held in custody for six days before being granted a cash bail of $1.5 million. On 29th of the same month, he pleaded not guilty. The trial was hit by a lot of challenges since some police officers tried to cover up the shooting in order to protect Mr. Dyke. However, they were later identified as detective David March, Joseph Walsh, and Thomas Gaffney. After a lengthy trial, Mr. Dyke was found guilty on 5th October 2018 of official misconduct and a second-degree murder of McDonald and other I6 victims (Taylor, Pg.2).

References

Gutowski, C., and Jeremy, G. “The Complicated, Short Life Of Laquan McDonald”. Chicagotribune.Com, 2015, https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct-laquan-mcdonald-trouble-met-20151211-story.html. Accessed 7 Dec 2018.

Pavlick, E., Ji, H., Pan, X., & Callison-Burch, C.The Gun Violence Database: A new task and data set for NLP.(2016). In Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 1018-1024).

Taylor, David. “Chicago Police Officer Who Shot Black Teen 16 Times Found Guilty Of  Murder”. The Guardian, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/05/chicago-laquan-mcdonald-jason-van-dyke. Accessed 7 Dec 2018.