Bodycam video appears to show Chicago cop shooting at man who’s running away
Bodycam video appears to show Chicago cop shooting at man who’s running away
Police bodycam footage recently released by the Civilian Office of Police Accountability appears to show an officer opening fire at a man who was running away and down a flight of stairs.
The footage was made public late last week, 60 days after a Chicago Police officer fatally shot Aquoness Cathery, 24, in the 6100 block of South King Drive.
Police said at the time that Cathery, who lived in the Park Manor neighborhood, was armed when he was shot. After the shooting, a police spokesman tweeted a photo from the scene that showed a black handgun resting on stairs. Bodycam footage appears to show that same handgun on the stairs where Cathery was shot.
Plain-clothes officers from the Grand Crossing District responded about 2:15 p.m. on Nov. 29, 2017, to a report of shots fired the 6100 block of South King Drive, where they confronted an armed man, Chicago Police said at the time.
The released footage begins with an office hustling up a set of wooden stairs and bursting into an apartment with at least three people inside. As the officer runs into the kitchen, he sees Cathery running through the back door and out onto a shared porch area.
The video shows Cathery holding a gun in his right hand as he turns right to run down a set of stairs. As he is turning, Cathery’s right arm is pressed against the handrail to the stairs and the gun appears to be pointed in the officer’s direction. As Cathery rounds the stairs, the officer opens fire.
The officer partly blocks his bodycam as he walks down the stairs. Cathery can be seen lying on the ground, with his feet on the bottom two stairs as the officer tells him to “relax” before calling for an ambulance as someone screams in the background. As he’s on the ground, Cathery raises his hands, one of them covered in blood, and looks at the officer, who tells him “It’s OK.”
“I got one person shot,” the officer tells the dispatcher. “Shots fired by police. Shots fired by police.”
Seconds later, another officer walks down the stairs, and the officer who shot Cathery tells him, “Secure that weapon” that is on the stairs.
Cathery was pronounced dead less than 12 hours after he was shot, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office. Court records show that in the six years before his death, Cathery was arrested several times, mostly on charges related to guns and drugs. In 2014, he was sentenced to 3 1/2 years in prison after he was charged with aggravated unlawful use of a weapon and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
COPA has not yet ruled if the shooting was justified or not and a spokeswoman for the agency declined to comment further. The officer who shot Cathery was placed on desk duty for 30 days.