Alma Benitez never minced words about her alleged mistreatment by Chicago police after witnessing the infamous 2014 shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald.
Benitez, who was in the drive-thru of a nearby Burger King at the moment that Officer Jason Van Dyke opened fire, said she was harassed and belittled by detectives who accused her of lying about what she saw.
“It felt like I was in a lion’s cage,” Benitez said in an interview with the city inspector general’s office. “… I was real shocked that day. I’m like, these are the people I’m supposed to trust when making a police report?”
Benitez claimed that detectives questioned her at a nearby station for hours that night, pressuring her to change her story and even insisting the police dashboard camera video of the shooting — which later became a national symbol of Chicago police brutality — contradicted her account that McDonald posed no threat to the officers.
Earlier this month, after more than three years of delay, the city settled a federal lawsuit filed by Benitez alleging police tried to cover up Van Dyke’s actions by berating witnesses and falsifying statements in official reports. The city acknowledged no wrongdoing by any of the officers or detectives on duty that night.
The amount of the settlement will be made public when the City Council’s Finance Committee considers it for approval, possibly as soon as its next meeting in December. The full council would then vote.
The settlement brings a quiet end to one of the more hotly contested aspects of McDonald’s shooting — whether a “code of silence” within the Police Department prompted Van Dyke’s fellow officers to cover up or falsify evidence to make it appear that Van Dyke was justified in shooting the knife-wielding teen 16 times.
Benitez was one of the first witnesses at the scene to cry foul. That night, the then-31-year-old mother of three gave an interview to a local news station saying McDonald clearly posed no threat to the police at the time that Van Dyke opened fire.
“It was super-exaggerated,” Benitez said in the interview aired hours later by NBC-5. “You didn’t need that many cops to begin with. They didn’t need to shoot him.”
But unlike other witnesses at the scene, Benitez was never called to testify at Van Dyke’s 2018 jury trial on first-degree murder charges or the bench trial months later of three police officers accused of conspiring to cover up aspects of the shooting.
Van Dyke was convicted of second-degree murder and aggravated battery and sentenced to nearly seven years in prison. The three other officers, meanwhile, were acquitted of all counts by Cook County Associate Judge Domenica Stephenson in a controversial ruling.
Sources involved with those cases told the Chicago Tribune that Benitez hurt her reliability as a witness by changing over time her description of what she saw that night — including where she was at the moment Van Dyke opened fire.
Bill McCaffrey, a spokesman for the city’s Law Department, declined to comment with the settlement still pending.
Benitez’s lawyer, Amanda Yarusso, said that the whole episode has had a “big ripple effect” on her client but that Benitez is “happy to have this chapter of her life be resolved.”
“I’m glad she’s getting some compensation that she can leverage into a real positive for her and her family,” Yarusso said. “For Alma, it was never about the money — it was about standing up for truth and justice.”
The court-ordered release of the dashcam video in November 2015 showing McDonald’s killing caused a firestorm of controversy that led to weeks of street protests and the firing of police Superintendent Garry McCarthy. It also prompted a U.S. Justice Department investigation that found the Chicago Police Department routinely violated the civil rights of citizens, particularly minorities.
The video — which was the key evidence at both criminal trials — showed the white officer open fire within six seconds of exiting his police SUV on South Pulaski Road as the black teen walked diagonally away from officers with a small knife in his hand.
With McDonald about 10 feet away, Van Dyke took a step forward and fired. McDonald spun and fell to the street, lying motionless on his side. Van Dyke took another step forward and fired again. Over the next 13 seconds, he unloaded all 16 rounds from his gun, striking McDonald in the head, chest, back and both arms and legs.
At the time, Benitez had just gotten off a late shift at a nearby sandwich shop and was in the Burger King drive-thru with a friend. She told the city inspector general she heard gunshots and saw McDonald fall.
“I kept hearing gunshots, and then I yelled, ‘Stop shooting! He’s dead already!'” according to a transcript of the interview. “When I yelled … these officers turned around and told me to leave the scene, and when they noticed I had a phone in my hand, one of the officers came straight to me and asked me for my phone.”
Benitez alleged in her lawsuit that she and her friend, along with several other witnesses, were whisked to the detective headquarters at 51st Street and Wentworth Avenue and detained for as long as six hours.
In her interview with Ferguson’s office, Benitez described one detective who allegedly became incensed when another witness to the shooting — a truck driver who was in the Burger King parking lot updating his logbook — described McDonald’s killing as “an execution.”
“This guy went off, the detective. He like blew up,” Benitez recounted, according to the transcript. “He was like, ‘I do not know why you care! We just got another bump out (of) the street. … We did (you) a favor.'”
Another detective, she said, later threatened her with jail for lying about what she’d seen, saying her story was “not adding up to the video,” according to Benitez’s testimony to the inspector general.
“I said, ‘Well, I don’t know what to tell you. You guys asked me questions. I’m just answering what I saw from what I believe,” Benitez said. “And he said, ‘Well, it’s not adding up because what you’re saying, you’re basically lying, and you could go to jail for lying.'”
Benitez said she began to panic and declined to answer any more questions. Detectives let her go only after she asked for a lawyer, she said.
According to handwritten police reports released by the city, Benitez “refused to remain” at the Area Central headquarters “for further interview” and left with her friend.
Benitez was never able to identify by name any of the detectives who interviewed her at the station that night, according to court records
Meanwhile, in another potential blow to her value as a witness, an FBI search warrant unsealed in October alleged Benitez gave “multiple conflicting accounts” about whether she’d taken photos and shot video footage at the scene with her cellphone.
The affidavit attached to the warrant — which was filed under seal in September 2015 — sought to search the email account Benitez allegedly used to attempt to send the video to someone at the Police Department from the scene.
The affidavit also revealed that the day after McDonald was killed, Benitez told a friend in a Facebook conversation that she had video and photos from the scene.
“I cannot send u the videos cuz they r too long,” Benitez wrote, according to the 25-page affidavit. “I know nobody knows about the pics or videos … only u.”
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
This story has been updated to correct the spelling of the name of Alma Benitez’ attorney, Amanda Yarusso. The Tribune regrets the error.