Mayor Demands To Know How Teen Killed By Chicago Cop Got Gun

CHICAGO: Mayor Lori Lightfoot said Monday that she has directed the Chicago Police Department to capture and bring to justice whoever gave a 13-year-old boy the handgun he was carrying last week when he was fatally shot by a police officer.

Adam Toledo was shot in the chest after he ran from officers in the Little Village neighborhood shortly before 3 a.m. on March 29. He died at the scene and a gun was recovered.

We will find the person who put the gun in Adam’s hand, Lightfoot said during a news conference in the neighborhood on the West Side. An adult put a gun in a child’s hand, a young impressionable child who should not be provided with lethal force.”

Police Superintendent David Brown and the department’s chief of detectives will use every resource to track down the origins of this gun through tracing, fingerprinting and DNA and any other means, Lightfoot said.

The Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which is investigating the shooting, has said it would release body camera footage of the shooting first to the boy’s family and then the public.

According to police, officers were dispatched to Little Village after the departments ShotSpotter technology detected the sound of eight gun shots. When they arrived, Toledo and a 21-year-old man ran away. While chasing the teen, there was an armed confrontation during which the officer shot him once in the chest.

The 21-year-old man was arrested on a misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest.

The mayor and Brown, who also spoke at the news conference, declined to answer when asked whether the boy fired at the officer before he was shot in the chest.

But the mayor strongly suggested that the teen may have been involved in gangs before that night and that a gang member gave him the gun.

Gangs are preying on our most vulnerable, corrupting these young minds with promises of familia and lucre, she said.

None of us should accept that we have adults here and across Chicago preying upon vulnerable teenage boys, saying that it is everyone’s duty to give these children the love and support they need.

That’s how we lessen the allure of gang life, she said.

Explaining why Adam’s age and name were not released until a few days after his death, Brown said the man who was with Adam the night he was killed told police a false name when asked to identify the teen. Brown said Adam’s fingerprints did not match any in any police databases.

Brown said Adam had run away at least twice in the days before his death. Adam’s mother reported him missing March 26, but told police the following day that he had returned. Investigators searching through recently closed missing persons reports reached out to Adam’s mother after the shooting and she told them she had not seen him in several days but had not reported him missing again.

She identified his body on Wednesday at the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office.

Lightfoot said the boy’s death would result in a new foot chase policy, though she did not elaborate, saying only that police foot chases are highly dangerous to officers, those being pursued and others in the area.

She vowed that a new policy would be in place before the beginning of the summer.

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