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Video contradicts accounts of Chicago cops in a 2014 fatal shooting of teen

Two Chicago police officers changed their accounts of a controversial fatal police shooting after viewing police surveillance video that showed they were not as close to the shooting as they had said, court records show.

The altered accounts raise doubts about the official narrative of the shooting of 19-year-old Roshad McIntosh, who police said pointed a gun at an officer before he was shot.

The questions come after Chicago’s police oversight agency took the unusual step this summer of re-opening its investigation into the 2014 shooting on the West Side.

McIntosh was shot on the back porch of a brick two-flat in the 2800 block of West Polk Street after he fled on foot as numerous officers pulled up to investigate a tip about guns.

About six hours after the shooting, Officer Saharat Sampim told investigators from the Independent Police Review Authority that he was standing in a vacant lot next to the house when the shots rang out, according to interview transcripts. Watching from the side of the house, Sampim said, he was about 15 to 20 feet from McIntosh when he clearly saw the teen with his arm extended, holding a gun, before Officer Robert Slechter opened fire.

But a Police Department surveillance camera shows Sampim in a different position. And in a January 2016 deposition obtained by the Tribune through an open records request, Sampim acknowledged that he was actually in front and to the side of the house, placing him farther from the back porch and at a different angle than he first said. Nonetheless, he said he still saw the events behind the house from his position near the sidewalk in front.

The commanding officer at the scene, Sgt. Nicola Zodo, told detectives that night — and IPRA investigators later — that he was behind the house in an alley in his squad car when he heard shots and rushed on foot to the porch to order McIntosh to drop a gun and handcuff him, records show.

But Zodo later said under oath that the video — which he did not know existed until he met with his attorneys to prepare for his deposition — indicated his squad car was in front of the house when the shots were fired, suggesting he would have taken longer to reach the porch than he’d said earlier.

The video did not capture what happened behind the house.

A federal lawsuit filed by McIntosh’s family alleges he was unarmed and trying to surrender when he was shot, but police recovered a loaded 9 mm pistol from the porch. City lawyers also have photos of him displaying guns before his death.

Another officer who said he was behind the house corroborated the account of McIntosh pointing the gun, though he said he did not see Slechter when he opened fire.

IPRA, the city’s often-ineffective and now-defunct police watchdog agency, ruled the shooting within policy in 2015. The investigation, however, was similar to other IPRA shooting investigations in that interviews with the officers were cursory — several of them lasted 25 minutes or less — and investigators left some avenues of questioning unexplored. IPRA records indicate that investigators did not interview any witnesses to the shooting other than the police.

But this summer, disciplinary officials re-opened the case at the request of the family after reviewing the initial investigation. The newly opened Civilian Office of Police Accountability is still investigating both the shooting and the actions of the other officers, said spokeswoman Mia Sissac.

“We saw that there were some insufficiencies in the original investigation, and it warranted a new investigation,” she said earlier this week.

The case is the latest in which doubts have emerged about Chicago police accounts of a fatal shooting.

Controversy over a “code of silence” in the department intensified two years ago after the court-ordered release of video of a white officer fatally shooting black teen Laquan McDonald. Several officers at the scene indicated the knife-wielding 17-year-old advanced on police before Officer Jason Van Dyke fired, but the footage showed McDonald was veering away before Van Dyke shot him 16 times.

Van Dyke faces first-degree murder charges, while three officers have been criminally charged with conspiring to cover up the facts of the shooting. The Police Department is also seeking to fire Van Dyke and four other officers.

In the furor over the McDonald shooting video, Mayor Rahm Emanuel acknowledged the existence of a code of silence, and the U.S. Department of Justice determined that Chicago cops have had little reason to fear consequences for lying.

An attorney for the McIntosh family, Andrew Stroth, said the discrepancies between the officers’ original statements and the video were evidence of a “blatant and intentional effort to cover up” the facts of an unjustified shooting.

“It’s the code of silence again,” Stroth said Wednesday.

Bill McCaffrey, spokesman for the city’s Law Department, declined to comment, citing the McIntosh family’s pending lawsuit. Neither Zodo nor Sampim could be reached for comment, and several attorneys for the officers involved either declined to comment or could not be reached.

Though McIntosh died before the McDonald video upended policing in Chicago, his death drew attention because it happened weeks after an officer’s fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., touched off violent protests there.

The incident unfolded on a sweltering evening in August 2014 as McIntosh stood with a group of men along Polk near California Avenue.

McIntosh’s mother, Cynthia Lane, who filed the lawsuit, said in a deposition that he was a good student in high school and the loving father of a baby son. She said she was not aware of him being involved with a gang.

Officers, however, testified that he had a tattoo indicating affiliation with a faction of the Traveling Vice Lords and was standing on a block controlled by the gang. He’d been arrested by Chicago police a handful of times, though he had no charges for gun crimes in Cook County adult court, records show.

Officers had received a tip from an informant that the men on Polk Street had guns, and eight officers pulled up just after 7 p.m. Video from the police surveillance camera shows the officers piling out of the cars, some with guns drawn. Seconds later, McIntosh bolted around the house to the backyard, with officers on his heels as other cops sprinted through the vacant lot next to the house.

Slechter, who joined the force in 2005, said in official interviews and a deposition that he saw McIntosh holding a pistol as the teen entered the backyard and ran up the porch steps. McIntosh ignored orders to drop the gun, Slechter said, and pointed it at him from the elevated porch landing. Slechter fired three times, with one shot hitting him in the heart, according to the autopsy.

Police said they recovered the 9mm pistol near his body, though an Illinois State Police inspection found no usable fingerprints, a report shows.

Toxicology tests found no substances in McIntosh’s system, according to records from the Cook County medical examiner’s office.

Along with Slechter and Sampim, a third officer said he saw McIntosh point the gun. Officer Patrick Bowery said in official statements and a deposition that he was in the alley and saw McIntosh point the gun at Slechter, though he said he didn’t know Slechter’s exact position in the yard because he was focusing on McIntosh. He said he was sure McIntosh was pointing the gun at Slechter, though.

Bowery could not be reached for comment.

Sampim was the only officer who said he could see both McIntosh and Slechter — the officer who shot him — at the moment of the shooting.

Sampim, who joined the department in 1998, told IPRA investigators about six hours after the shooting that he had heard Slechter tell McIntosh to drop the gun, according to a transcript. Sampim said he ran and stood near a truck parked “in the middle” of the vacant lot. Watching from the side of the house, he saw McIntosh holding a gun with his arm extended before the officer shot him, he said.

But the video — which has no audio — shows Sampim near the sidewalk in front and to the side of the house in the moment when the men being detained by police can be seen ducking and scattering as shots apparently rang out.

Sampim said in his sworn statement that he couldn’t be sure that was the moment of the shooting, but he also acknowledged he was near the sidewalk when the shots were fired, contradicting his early statements.

Still, he said he could see Slechter in the yard and McIntosh on the rear porch pointing the gun.

“I mean, I have a diagonal view, sort of, like, maybe a diagonal view of the yard. So I have a good — good amount of the yard,” he said in the deposition.

Stroth said there was “no possible way” Sampim saw the shooting from the front of the house in the way he described.

“His narrative is false,” Stroth said.

Zodo, a 21-year department veteran who has since been promoted to lieutenant, told detectives shortly after the shooting that he had pulled his squad car around the block and was driving in the rear alley when he heard shots, according to a detective’s handwritten report. Two months later, he repeated that account to IPRA investigators, saying he heard the shots, jumped out of the car and ran through the backyard to the porch, according to a transcript of his deposition. Zodo said McIntosh was still holding the gun after being shot and falling to the porch, and that he ordered him to drop it. McIntosh did so, he said. Zodo then handcuffed McIntosh with Slechter’s help, he said.

In November 2015, Zodo gave a deposition with many similar details, but he acknowledged that the video shows his police car in front of the house as the men ducked and scattered at the apparent sound of gunfire.

“Before I viewed the (video), I thought I was in the alley driving eastbound when I heard the three or four shots. Obvious … according to the video, I was still on Polk, heading westbound,” he said.

dhinkel@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @dhinkel

Related: IPRA reopens investigation into fatal 2014 shooting by Chicago police “

Related: Protesters march on West Side after fatal police-involved shooting “

More stories: Chicago’s Cop Crisis “

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