The officer, identified by his attorney as Noah Ball, believed the suspect was pointing a gun — which turned out to be a cellphone — and made a split-second decision to shoot, his attorney told CNN. As an independent police oversight office investigates the incident, new body camera video obtained exclusively by CNN shows the frantic final moments leading up to the shooting and what immediately followed. In the video, taken on the night of May 18, a police officer jumps out of his car to chase after a 13-year-old who had been rescued from a suspected stolen vehicle and ran past. Other officers are also being pursued, including Ball, who his attorney says saw the vehicle hours earlier drive right into his car. Officers chased the teenager to a nearby gas station on the west side of Chicago Marathon, and one officer fired three shots, audio from police body cameras showed. A body camera video shows the 13-year-old at the end of the chase, slowing, turning and appearing to raise his hands as he is shot. He was unarmed. The teenager’s lawyers told CNN he was trying to turn himself in. The officer’s attorney said Ball mistook a large cell phone — which he said the 13-year-old was holding — for a weapon and made a split-second decision. Footage from various officer body cameras shows officers reacting to the shooting. One goes to the ground and says, “Jesus Christ the King, man.” He later approaches the teenager and asks, “Did anyone get hit?” then he notices the injured teenager and says, “Hit? Damn it, get an ambulance.” Ball’s body camera was not activated at the time of the shooting and did not activate until about 40 seconds after the shooting ended. Shortly after his camera is turned on, Ball can be heard asking another officer, “Is your camera on?” and when that officer says yes, he says, “Okay, fine.” Ball’s attorney, Timothy Grace, told CNN his client’s body camera was turned off by mistake, but the teenager’s attorneys said it was inexcusable. “The suggestion that, ‘Hey, maybe this was just a temporary absence because he was involved in a stalking,’ first of all, they’re educated,” Steven Hart, one of the attorneys representing the teenager’s family, told CNN. “They’ve thought ahead. They know they’re supposed to activate their cameras and it’s up to them to do it. Nobody else can.” Only a mobile phone and a pool of blood were left on the ground shortly after the incident, when two officers lifted the 13-year-old by his sweatshirt and legs and dragged him away from the petrol pump where he fell injured. The teenager’s lawyers said it was a clear example of how the teenager was viewed by the police. “They are dragging him with no regard for this young man, dragging him like a rag doll away from the pump to another area after he had already sustained a serious injury to his back,” said Andrew M. Stroth, one of the teenager’s attorneys. CNN. Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown told reporters the day after the shooting, “They moved the young man away from what could have been flammable gas pumps based on the fact that the firing was in that direction of the gas pumps.”
“His hands are up”
According to the Chicago Police Department, the 13-year-old was a passenger in a suspected stolen car. When officers tried to stop the car, he jumped out and started running, police said. Brown told reporters that the car’s license plate was recognized by a license plate reader, and then a police helicopter began following the car and broadcasting the location. A short time later, the police descended on the location and a chase began. It was over in seconds. “His hands are up, there was no reason for the officer to shoot,” Stroth told CNN. Some people on stage that night seemed to agree. “He had the king’s hands up!” a bystander is heard yelling into an officer’s body camera. Another witness, who chose to go by only “Anthony,” told CNN’s WLS, “His hands were up and I saw the officer run toward the boy and as soon as he started shooting that boy didn’t have a gun or anything .” But Ball’s attorney is looking less at where the hands were and more at what his client thought was in them. “Drop the gun!” can be heard on an officer’s body camera. “Show us your fking hands!” and, “He’s got an afking gun!” they are heard shouting after the shots. Ball’s attorney wrote in part to CNN: “You can hear Officer Ball yelling that he has a gun.” Ball believed “the object being pointed at him was a firearm. That dark object in his hand that was pointed at the officers was not a firearm, but actually a large cell phone,” Grace wrote. He added, “Officer Ball had to make a split-second decision as he had no cover or concealment. He dropped his service weapon to stop the threat.” The 13-year-old’s lawyers disputed that there was anything in his hands and argued that there is no definitive video to prove it. They also said he was trying to turn himself in and that the pursuit should not have happened in the first place. “If all it takes is someone leaving the police to justify a shooting, we have real problems in this city and in this country,” Hart told CNN. Stroth added, “No charges have been filed against him, he was in a stolen vehicle and fled. He ran away. And that justifies being shot in the back and paralyzed from the waist down?” Ball was stripped of his police powers two days after the shooting, pending the outcome of the Civil Office’s investigation.
Would the new foot chase policy have prevented the shooting?
In June, the Chicago Police Department released its long-awaited new policy on foot pursuits, nearly a month after the shooting of this 13-year-old and more than a year after the shooting and killing of 22-year-old Anthony Alvarez. and 13-year-old Adam Toledo during a foot chase.
It doesn’t go into effect until the end of August.
The new policy states that officers can only engage in a pursuit if “there is a valid law enforcement need to detain the individual” that outweighs the risks of the pursuit.
Other factors in determining whether to initiate a pursuit include: area containment, law enforcement saturation in the area, helicopter unit support, and more.
“In determining the most appropriate tactical choice, the safety of members of the Department, members of the public and any individual targeted is the primary concern,” the new policy states.
The policy also states, “The decision to initiate or continue a Foot Pursuit is a decision that a member of the Department must make quickly and under unpredictable and dynamic circumstances. It is recognized that Foot Pursuits can put members of the Department and the public at significant risk.”
Alexandra Block, an attorney for the ACLU of Illinois, says the language in the new policy doesn’t go far enough.
“There’s so much boring language about how officers have to know, look at the totality of the circumstances or look at alternatives to go after people, but there aren’t enough black and white rules that officers have to follow,” Block told CNN .
“And so you can find officers in split-second decision situations where if they’re not trained to either go after someone or not go after someone in a situation, they’re likely to make a wrong decision.
The teenager’s family has filed a federal lawsuit against the Chicago Police Department.
“He can’t walk, he can’t stand up, he can’t go to the bathroom, he can’t get his food, I mean his life is changed forever,” Stroth told CNN.
Hart added, “He’s just not our 13-year-old client. He’s at the end of a long list of minorities who have been shot, severely maimed or killed by the Chicago Police Department.”
“They’re supposed to value the sanctity of human life. There was no value here. They didn’t value the life of this 13-year-old,” he said.
