by Jeff Coen
But that was not to be. Van Dyke stood aggressively on the median stripes on Pulaski and lifted his service weapon. Seconds later he was firing. The first shots spun Laquan, bending him slightly at the waist. He fell stiffly. More shots struck him. He landed on his side, facing Van Dyke, who continued shooting. Puffs of smoke and debris rose around Laquan’s body as the officer emptied his pistol. Van Dyke fired all sixteen shots from his semi-automatic before another officer stepped forward and kicked the small knife out of Laquan’s hand.
Almost immediately, the police messaging apparatus went into gear, as Fraternal Order of Police spokesman Pat Camden told reporters that Laquan had been a threat to the officers and that he had been shot after refusing to comply with their orders and lunging at them. E-mails later released to the media showed that notification of the fatal police shooting was moving through official channels. Early in the morning after the shooting, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s deputy chief of staff for public safety was notified by a Chicago Public Schools official that Laquan, a student at an alternative school, had been shot and killed by police.
The wagon-circling started just as quickly. Despite the chaotic scene and multi-vehicle response with officers viewing what happened from a number of vantage points, police reports generated that night were in striking agreement. Reporting officers wrote that Laquan was moving menacingly in the direction of Walsh and Van Dyke, and one contended Laquan had even tried to get up off the pavement after being felled by the hail of bullets. It was a company line that would be refuted by dashcam video from one of the responding SUVs, which showed Laquan veering toward his right as he walked, a distinct movement away from Van Dyke, an officer who had had at least twenty citizen complaints lodged against him, some of which were for excessive force. The video showed no attempt by the teen to attack with his pocketknife.
Emanuel’s handpicked police superintendent, Garry McCarthy, would later say he met with top staffers at police headquarters and viewed the video just two days after the shooting. He told the Tribune in 2019 that he immediately knew the shooting was a criminal problem for Van Dyke and could even lead to a murder charge. Still, it took some nine days to strip Van Dyke of his police powers, though McCarthy later told the paper he recalled ordering it done sooner. McCarthy also said he chose not to review police reports in the case because he didn’t want to interfere in outside reviews of it, a decision that would have left McCarthy unaware of apparent attempts by some officers on the scene to cover up the full gravity of what had happened on Pulaski Road.
It did not take city lawyers long to realize the exposure the case and the video represented to city hall. On March 16, 2015, city records showed that attorneys Michael Robbins and Jeffrey Neslund, who were representing Laquan’s family, raised questions with the department of Mayor Emanuel’s corporation counsel Stephen Patton, the top lawyer in Chicago government. They wrote him a letter days later describing problems with the police reports, which they contended were falsified.
“We have confirmed that the narrative summaries contained in the police reports of both police and civilian witnesses are false,” they wrote. “Civilian witnesses who are alleged to have told the police that they did not see the shooting, have told us they did indeed see the shooting, and that it was unnecessary (which of course, is entirely consistent with the dash cam video). One witness whom the police reports alleged did not see the shooting, in fact told multiple police officers that he saw the shooting, and it was ‘like an execution.’ Civilian witnesses have told us that they were held against their will for hours, intensively questioned by detectives, during which they were repeatedly pressured by police to change their statements.”
The city reached a settlement in principle with the lawyers and Laquan’s family within days, still in late March of that year, agreeing to compensate them with $5 million. But it wasn’t a fact the city would shout from the rooftops. The first public inkling of what was unfolding came in April, when Patton presented it to the City Council Finance Committee. The full council approved it April 15.
Both things conveniently happened after an April 7 runoff election between Emanuel and challenger Chuy Garcia, which Emanuel won.
The mayor contended he hadn’t known the severity of the McDonald shooting until Patton briefed him in March, though city records showed numerous meetings between his staff and police leaders and between McCarthy and the mayor well before then. Emanuel also publicly claimed he didn’t know there were wide discrepancies between the police reports and the dashcam video until its public release, which came much later.
For months the city resisted releasing the video, contending it would compromise criminal investigations into what had happened. The feds indeed were interested, and had gathered up video of the incident, including from the security cameras at the Burger King where Laquan had cut through the parking lot.
A lawsuit brought by independent journalist Brandon Smith eventually forced the issue. It argued the city was violating the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to release the video. Cook County judge Franklin Valderrama ordered it made public in November 2015, and the city held its breath.
The reaction was swift and intense, as the images of Van Dyke gunning down Laquan were broadcast around the world. Protests rippled across Chicago, including a virtual siege on the city’s main shopping strip in the midst of the Christmas rush. That protest on Michigan Avenue included a march led by Reverend Jesse Jackson and saw protesters blocking the entrances to major stores as stunned tourists looked on and snapped photos with their cell phones. “Sixteen shots and a cover up!” became a familiar rallying cry. Emanuel slipped further into damage control. McCarthy was fired December 1 in the wake of the video’s release, with the mayor calling him a distraction as the department tried to repair its relationship with Chicagoans.
But the mayor himself never quite shook the case. After first saying he didn’t think a federal review of the department separate from the ongoing probe of the Laquan McDonald shooting was necessary, Emanuel flip-flopped and said he would welcome it. The US Justice Department launched one that same month, December 2015.
That review found serious systemic failures in training, use of force, and police accountability. The report noted that the department had received around thirty thousand complaints of police misconduct just in the five years before the study, but that only 2 percent were found to be credible by police oversight bodies, a rate that defied belief. From there, actual discipline was haphazard at best. In other words, officers believed they were operating with near impunity, and it showed in their actions on the street.
The Department of Justice’s paper also included a short history of reform attempts in the city and a rundown of corruption cases, noting that “the Chicago Police Department has cycled in and out of the national consciousness almost since its inception, and the last several decades have been no exception.” Modern reform attempts dated to 1972, four years before the Hughes case, when Mayor Richard J. Daley established a reform panel that took four days of public comment on abuses. Daley’s son, the mayor Richard M., had his own version: in 1997, in response to the Austin Seven case, he established the Commission on Police Integrity, a panel that also was tasked with finding the causes of corruption.
Often in Chicago, such blue-ribbon panels are set up by politicians as a publicity move—a way of looking as if they are doing something about a problem or a major case. The groups are designed not to have teeth, and not much happens in response to their findings. Some are established with the intent of not digging too deeply into an issue and coming up with findings that are friendly to the politician who set panel members up in their influential posts in the first place. But that wasn’t what happened with the Rahm Emanuel version of the reform panel he set up after the McDonald killing. His Police Accountability Task Force’s findings were just about as damning as the federal report.
“We arrived at this point in part because of racism. We arrived at this point because of a ment
ality in CPD that the ends justify the means. We arrived at this point because of a failure to make accountability a core value and imperative within CPD. We arrived at this point because of a significant underinvestment in human capital,” the group wrote. Its makeup included former federal prosecutors, including lawyer Lori Lightfoot, and the city’s inspector general, Joseph Ferguson.
“CPD has missed opportunities to make accountability an organizational priority. Currently, neither the non-disciplinary interventions available nor the disciplinary system are functioning. The public has lost faith in the oversight system. Every stage of investigations and discipline is plagued by serious structural and procedural flaws that make real accountability nearly impossible,” they wrote.
Van Dyke ultimately was charged in a state case with first-degree murder. It was believed he was the first officer in decades to face that charge for an on-duty incident. He was convicted of second-degree murder and sixteen counts of aggravated battery—one for each shot he fired into Laquan McDonald. His sentence was eighty-one months in prison, with a chance at probation after two years in custody. Ferguson, the inspector general, ultimately found in his own report that sixteen officers had been involved in the cover-up of Van Dyke’s conduct. Despite that large number, which included supervisors and ten officers who Ferguson found had made false statements about what happened, just three had faced criminal charges of conspiracy and obstruction of justice. The trio, which included Van Dyke’s partner that night, Joseph Walsh, were acquitted in a bench trial.
CPD itself wound up subjected to a federal consent decree, approved by a judge in January 2019, which set court-mandated goals for reforms. In late 2019, a monitor found the department had missed most of the first fifty deadlines it faced to make changes.
Ultimately, Rahm Emanuel’s political career in Chicago was buffeted too badly by the turbulence of the Laquan McDonald shooting. It had a severe impact on his credibility and standing in Chicago’s African American community, a key part of the coalition he needed to stay in office. Although some advisers were convinced he could still win, Emanuel announced he would not seek reelection in 2018. “This has been the job of a lifetime, but it is not a job for a lifetime” is how Emanuel explained it, not pointing to the case as a leading factor. His announcement, however, came just a day before the start of jury selection in Van Dyke’s murder trial.
His successor would be task force member Lori Lightfoot, whose platform unsurprisingly included police reform. But, again, a Chicago leader found building momentum tough. She initially kept Superintendent Eddie Johnson, a department insider Emanuel had tapped to replace McCarthy. She eventually fired Johnson, however, saying she learned he had lied to her about an incident in which he was found asleep behind the wheel of his car, apparently after a night of drinking with a subordinate he was supposedly in a relationship with.
In 2019 Lightfoot became the latest in a long line of Chicago mayors to suggest the department had reached a turning point toward reform. “That must start at the top,” Lightfoot said as she announced Johnson’s dismissal. “That hard but important work is impossible without strong leadership focused on integrity, honesty, legitimacy, and accountability.”
16
A FINAL PUSH
Despite Terry Strong’s insistence that he would have no problem talking to anyone about his work in the Hughes case, he had been leery of talking to Sherlock. The two of them went back and forth a few times before Strong finally agreed to sit down with the latest person who claimed to be starting the investigation anew and considering whether the police purposefully scuttled it back in 1976.
Sherlock wasn’t surprised by the resistance. It wasn’t that he believed Strong had done anything wrong, it was just that he knew Strong was a “typical ’70s dick,” the shorthand for detective. Sherlock knew they just weren’t very loose-lipped as a class, and wouldn’t eagerly come forward and talk about older cases. But he also knew that if he could get Strong to talk to him, it would help to explain a lot of what he had learned.
“They don’t forget names and places. They’re good. They’re old school,” Sherlock said later. It turned out Strong knew Sherlock’s uncle Bill, who was an evidence tech in CPD from that era.
Strong was quick to say that ninety-nine percent of the police officers working the case were doing the right thing, they just didn’t know at the time what they were up against. The frontline cops didn’t understand that when they took a step forward in the investigation, somebody behind the scenes “was taking it out, was changing it, changing its path,” he told Sherlock.
Strong suggested that the first person to realize the case was going to be a problem had been his partner, Jack Boyle, who was deceased by the time of Strong’s meeting with Sherlock. Boyle was the older and more experienced of the two men. Almost as soon as the two got the case, Boyle could tell what was probably coming. He had told Strong, “Watch this.”
Boyle had seen a thing or two, and any murder with potential political and mob connections was bound to be a shit show. Sure enough, Strong wasn’t disappointed.
Strong took Sherlock through the early hours of his getting the Hughes case on May 17, 1976, including how Haberkorn told him and Boyle not to inform his commanding officer, Curtin, what he was working on and how Bilandic had been involved in Costello being brought to the Ninth District.
Haberkorn directed Strong and Boyle to have coffee with John Furmanek and his partner. When the four men returned, Strong told Sherlock, Nick Costello and his father, a Chicago fire lieutenant, were in Haberkorn’s office, and Haberkorn told Strong that he, Haberkorn, would conduct the interview.
“Strong observed Haberkorn question Costello about his involvement in the shooting death of Hughes. Costello stated he had no knowledge of the incident and refused to answer any more questions,” Sherlock wrote in his FBI report. “Strong felt the questioning of Costello was fruitless.”
Afterward, Strong said, he and his partner made their own plans to get Mary Mestrovic from school and bring her to the Ninth District for questioning. That was because they were “perplexed” why she hadn’t already given a handwritten statement. When they arrived at the district, Haberkorn elbowed into their work again, but the two detectives still managed to prepare a written statement from Mestrovic.
Sherlock memorialized the next key portions of his conversation with Strong in what is known as an FBI 302—interview notes for the official case file. It read this way:
When the handwritten statement was completed and signed by Mestrovic and her mother, Chicago Police Deputy Chief John Townsend, who Strong did not expect to see in the 009th District, was waiting for Strong and Boyle directly outside the office from where they took the statement. Townsend said to Strong “give me that report.” Strong stated Townsend took the handwritten statement out of his hands and started to read the report. When Townsend finished reading the statement, Strong observed Townsend walk out the front door of the 009th District, with the statement in his possession, and walk south on Lowe Street heading directly to Mayor Richard J. Daley’s house. Strong stated it was common knowledge that the Mayor lived down the street from the 009th District Station on 35th and Lowe. Strong stated after approximately 30 minutes, Townsend returned to the station and ordered Strong to notify felony review and to move the investigation to Area 3.
Strong, Boyle, Furmanek, Furmanek’s partner, Mary Mestrovic, and her mother Rita were all taken to Area Three, Strong told Sherlock. Strong said he was greeted there by a top supervising prosecutor—another surprise to the investigators. Someone had notified him before Strong had contacted felony review.
Strong said he immediately took a moment to speak with the ranking prosecutor to discuss where they were. Sherlock memorialized what Strong told him next as his 302 continued:
Strong stated [the supervisory prosecutor] and his partner … stepped away from Strong while they discussed the case. Strong stated that the witness, Mestrovic, and her mother, were standing wit
hin earshot of [the prosecutor]. Strong stated he could hear [him] talking loudly, discrediting [Mary] as being drunk the night in question and not a reliable witness. Strong stated he believed the loud discrediting conversation between [the prosecutor] and his partner was staged. Strong noticed Mestrovic was crying and quickly became uncomfortable with her position.
When Strong told [the prosecutor] he believed he had enough to charge Costello, or at least enough to hold him for more questioning, [the prosecutor] responded defiantly, “no.”
Strong stated approximately one year after his interview of Costello and Mestrovic, a Cook County state’s attorney from Special Prosecution (name unknown) contacted Strong questioning why he didn’t pursue the case against Costello. Strong stated he told the state’s attorney to check with the boss of felony review. Strong stated that was the last he heard from the State’s Attorney’s office concerning the Hughes case.
Sherlock was interviewing a cop who was there, and one that he trusted. He believed Strong was telling him the truth.
Strong was clear about his theory of the case and about what his old-school plan of attack would have and should have been. Costello was the key. Attack that. He was in the car, and that was the angle to take. That had been ripped out from under the detectives with their hands on the case.
For the case to take the turn that it took had gotten Strong very upset. Strong had said as much, but Sherlock could sense the depth of the outrage. There was a family out there that had lost a seventeen-year-old son. He was here one day and gone the next. It had been Strong’s duty to solve the case, and he believed he had simply not been allowed to. The intensification of the Hughes family’s grief was in some ways on Strong’s shoulders because of what had happened, and he didn’t like it one bit. Strong was adamant about whose fault it was. This wasn’t the scuttling of an investigation by a bunch of cooperating players. It was a few people at the top, the ones who had the capability to pull strings and make things go away.