Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot said she ordered the police department to capture and bring to justice who provided the 13-year-old boy with the gun he was carrying last week when he was shot dead by a police officer
CHICAGO – Mayor Lori Lightfoot said on Monday that she ordered the Chicago Police Department to capture and bring to justice anyone who gave a 13-year-old boy the gun he was carrying last week when he was shot dead by a police officer.
Adam Toledo was shot in the chest after fleeing police in the Little Village neighborhood, just before 3 am on March 29. He died on the spot and a gun was recovered.
“We will find the person who put the gun in Adam’s hand,” said Lightfoot during a news conference in the West Side neighborhood. “An adult puts a gun in the hand of a child, an impressionable child who must not receive lethal force.”
Police superintendent David Brown and the department’s chief of detectives “will use all resources to trace the origins of this weapon through tracking, fingerprinting and DNA and any other means,” said Lightfoot.
The Police Liability Office, which is investigating the shooting, said it would release images of the camera body first to the boy’s family and then to the public.
According to the police, the officers were dispatched to Little Village after the department’s ShotSpotter technology detected the sound of eight shots. When they arrived, Toledo and a 21-year-old man fled. While chasing the teenager, there was an “armed confrontation” during which the policeman shot him in the chest once.
The 21-year-old man was arrested on charges of misdemeanor against imprisonment.
The mayor and Brown, who also spoke at the news conference, declined to respond when asked whether the boy shot the policeman before being shot in the chest.
But the mayor strongly suggested that the teenager may have been involved in gangs before that night and that a gang member gave him the gun.
“Gangs are attacking our most vulnerable, corrupting these young minds with promises of family and profit,” she said.
“None of us should accept that we have adults here and in Chicago attacking vulnerable teenagers,” saying that it is everyone’s duty to give these children the love and support they need.
“That’s how we lessen the fascination of gang life,” she said.
The mayor and the superintendent also addressed a recent “security alert for officers” within the department alerting officers that factions of a street gang instructed members to shoot unidentified Chicago Police vehicles in retaliation for the teenager’s death.
“The danger to police officers every day is real,” said Lightfoot, citing statistics showing 79 police officers in the city were shot last year, compared with 22 the year before.
She said she hopes the gang members are not “foolish enough” to shoot the police. Brown also called for calm, pointing to a statement made by the boy’s mother, Elizabeth Toledo, over the weekend.
“Adam was a sweet and loving boy,” she said. “He wouldn’t want anyone else to get hurt or die in his name.”
Brown also explained why Adam’s age and name were not released until a few days after his death, saying that the man who was with Adam the night he was killed told the police a false name when asked to identify the teenager. Brown said Adam’s fingerprints do not match those in any police database.
Brown said that Adam ran away at least twice in the days before his death. Adam’s mother reported his disappearance on March 26, but told the police the next day that he had returned. Investigators who searched for reports of recently closed missing persons contacted Adam’s mother after the shooting and she told them that she had not seen him “several days ago” but had not reported his disappearance 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 policy of stalking on foot, although she did not elaborate, saying only that police stalking is highly dangerous for police officers, those being chased and others in the area.
She vowed that a new policy would be in place before the beginning of the summer.
Lawyers for Adam’s family said on Monday night that they were requesting expedited meetings with the police to obtain evidence in the case and had not yet received a confirmed time to view police footage.
“We will not allow the anguish and emotion of the moment to interfere with our objective of obtaining the facts,” said a joint statement from lawyers Adeena Weiss Ortiz and Joel Hirschhorn. “We will address all public statements about the circumstances of Adam’s death as soon as we have the facts before us.”
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