Chicago's Little Village quietly mourns as video of Adam Toledo’s fatal shooting by a police officer emerges

CHICAGO — The scene of 13-year-old Adam Toledo’s death was marked by quiet displays of sorrow Thursday after the release of body camera video of a Chicago police officer shooting him.

People stopped by the scene in the Little Village neighborhood to leave votive candles and flowers. An embroidered cross with the teen’s initials adorned the fence in front of a small makeshift altar in his memory near the alley where Officer Eric Stillman shot the teen late last month.

Two women sat silently and cried in the alleyway behind the parking lot of Farragut Career Academy, near the opening in a fence near 23rd Street and Sawyer Avenue where Stillman shot him.

“We need space and time,” said one as a tear rolled down her cheek.

While the video shows what looks like a gun in Toledo’s hand shortly before the shooting — and one laying nearby afterward — the footage also appears to show that the teen’s hands were empty and raised when Stillman fired.

At the nearby Little Village Discount Mall along busy 26th Street, Jesus Hernández, a lifelong resident of one of Chicago’s largest Mexican and Mexican American neighborhoods, was overwhelmed with emotion after watching the video.

“He didn’t have nothing in his hands when the cop shot at him. As a matter of fact, he had his hands up and they still killed him,” Hernández said.

Nearby, William González stared at his phone for a couple of minutes. He searched for the video, he said, because he wanted to know the truth.

“I saw where the kid put his hands up and the cop shot immediately,” González said. “He was a child and maybe he could have been saved, from police, from gangs, from anything, but he died.”

At a laundromat near the discount mall, 84-year-old Eleazar Luna was watching the news as she did laundry. She had been following Toledo’s case and was waiting for the 5 p.m. broadcast to see the video. She said she knew seeing the footage was going to be painful. The grandmother said she had cared for four of her grandchildren since they were little and constantly prays that they don’t get involved in situations that would put them at risk.

“Either way, it is not his mother’s fault,” Luna said. “We often try to do the best for our children, but sometimes we can’t control everything.”

Authorities have said Stillman shot Toledo in the early hours of March 29 after chasing him while responding to the area because a man who had been with the teen is alleged to have fired shots. Ruben Roman, 21, was charged with felonies including child endangerment, aggravated unlawful use of a weapon and reckless discharge of a firearm after being arrested last Friday.

In Stillman’s body camera video, the officer pulls up in the alley, gets out of his vehicle and runs. Stillman can be heard shouting, “show me your (expletive) hands!” followed by “drop it!” with a flickering flashlight on Toledo as the teen starts to turn around.

Toledo can be seen stopped near an opening in a fence as he turns, and he appears to start lifting his hands. On a frame-by-frame viewing, a pistol-shaped object appears to be visible in Toledo’s right hand behind his back as he pauses near the opening in the fence and turns his head toward the officer.

On the grainy and shaky video, his hands are raised and appear to be empty at the moment the officer shoots him. Later in the video, an officer can be seen shining a flashlight onto a pistol behind the fence where Toledo had been standing.

Protests were announced for the days after the video’s release. As of early Thursday evening, however, there were not yet signs of the kind of large demonstrations Chicago has seen in the 10 months since George Floyd died under the knee of a Minneapolis cop. Chicago, like other cities, has been the scene of intense protests at a moment when a pandemic has accentuated racial inequality even as killings by police have driven anger nationwide. Protests in Chicago have sometimes coincided with property destruction and looting both downtown and in the neighborhoods.

Downtown on Thursday night, Rabbi Michael Ben Yosef, who led many peaceful marches through the city following Floyd’s death, organized an evening protest at Millennium Park.

Beforehand, Yosef stood alone on a Michigan Avenue sidewalk and reflected on a video that he said showed that police “treated a child with his hands up worse than you would treat a dog.”

“I cried when I saw it,” he said. “It was clear the police officer didn’t see a human being standing in front of him.

Yosef called on Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx to bring first-degree murder charges against the officer. He also said he would support an effort to recall Mayor Lori Lightfoot for failing communities such as Little Village.

Media members outnumbered protesters at the 6 p.m. start. The rabbi vowed to keep organizing protests, though it becomes emotionally more difficult each time a police officer shoots and kills another person of color, he said.

“It’s mentally draining. It’s frustrating,” he said. “But we cannot stop until something changes in our society.”

Lightfoot said the city had already been preparing for protests tied to the ongoing murder trial of former Officer Derek Chauvin, who is charged with killing Floyd, when the prospect of demonstrations over Toledo’s death arose. Preparation for unrest is a timely political issue, as Chicago Inspector General Joseph Ferguson in February issued a report criticizing the Lightfoot administration and police Superintendent David Brown for a disorganized response to protests and looting last spring that risked the safety of both police and citizens.

On Tuesday, the Police Department quietly revised its rules for handling protests to call on cops to better communicate with protesters and allow people time to leave before dispersing crowds. Protesters had complained of receiving little warning before cops waded with batons into crowds at spring protests, and activists throughout the summer complained of police indiscriminately beating them, pepper-spraying them, and making homophobic and other offensive comments. Police, meanwhile, said they’d been targeted by bricks, bottles and other projectiles.

While protests have been frequent over the last year, Chicagoans have a longer tradition of pouring into the streets to vent anger toward a Police Department with a lengthy record of abuses against Black and Latino people. Most notably, protesters spent days demonstrating in late 2015 after then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel was required by a judge to release video of white Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting Black 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times.

That controversy led to efforts to reform the Police Department, and Lightfoot rose to political prominence with promises of changing the force. So far, those reforms have been sluggish and incomplete, frustrating those who believe the police can be improved through better training, stronger supervision and tighter rules. Many activists who frequent street protests, however, don’t think the department can be fixed, and want it defunded and then abolished in favor of paying for other services.

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