In the video, Flint Farmer was lying on the grass between the curb and the sidewalk. It was shortly before 2 a.m. on a June morning in the West Englewood neighborhood, and Farmer had been shot by a Chicago police officer. Then, according to the video, the veteran officer, Gildardo Sierra, stepped onto the parkway and walked a semicircle about the prone Farmer as three bright flashes went off.
The flashes, captured by a police car video camera, were fatal shots fired into Farmer's back, officials say.
That shooting was the third by the officer since January and the second fatality in those six months, records show.
Sierra fired 16 shots at Farmer, hitting him seven times, autopsy reports show. A Cook County deputy medical examiner, after performing an autopsy and later reviewing the video, said the three shots in the back were the fatal wounds.
Sierra told investigators he feared for his life because he believed Farmer had a gun.
In fact, Farmer was only holding a cellphone.
Despite the video, the Police Department ruled Farmer's June 7 death justified, just as it had Sierra's other two shootings this year. But police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said he considers the Farmer case "a big problem" and told the Tribune that the officer involved should not have been on the street given his history of shootings.
The shooting is under investigation by the FBI, the Tribune has learned.
Together, the three shootings raise questions about the department's efforts to detect and track officers involved in multiple shootings, even over a short period of time. The shootings also renew long-standing concerns about the department's ability to investigate itself and reinforce the need for independent inquiries.
Indeed, the shootings are under investigation by the Independent Police Review Authority, the city agency that independently investigates shootings by police
A 2007 Tribune investigation of a decade's worth of shootings by Chicago police found that the department often cleared officers of wrongdoing after only cursory investigations, even when the officers shot people in the back or from behind. The newspaper's investigation found that officials repeatedly failed to interview key witnesses and consider important forensic evidence in a rush to exonerate officers.
McCarthy told the Tribune the previous administration failed to recognize a pattern in police shootings and had no mechanism to track if officers were repeatedly involved in shootings. He also said the department did not have a system in place to monitor the emotional and psychological state of officers involved in shootings, suggesting they could be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and should be kept off the streets until they are better.
Without naming Sierra, he said the first two shootings were justified but that the officer should have been assigned to desk duty before Farmer was shot.
"He shouldn't have been where he was," McCarthy said during a recent meeting with the Tribune editorial board. "We should've had him off the street so that he was not in that particular environment and that problematic type of scenario."
McCarthy confirmed that Sierra is the only officer who has been stripped of his police powers for an on-duty shooting incident since he became superintendent in May.
Sierra, 31, joined the department nine years ago and received his police union's distinguished service award in 2005.
"The video does not catch everything," Sierra told the Tribune. "It's only part of the incident."
He declined to comment further, saying he had been instructed not to speak to the media by the Police Department and his union.
All three of Sierra's shootings took place after midnight in the crime-ridden Englewood and West Englewood neighborhoods, an impoverished area where three officers have been killed in the last decade. There were 43 murders, 78 sexual assaults and 753 robberies in that police district from January through September the worst of any district in the city in all three categories, according to department statistics.
The first shooting involving Sierra occurred around 1:30 a.m. Jan. 7 when he and his partner stopped a green Oldsmobile Aurora similar to one implicated in earlier gunfire. The driver, Darius L. Pinex, handed over his license and registration but refused a request to turn off his engine and get out of the car, according to police reports.
Pinex's passenger then opened his door and Pinex made a furtive movement with his hand, the report said. The move prompted one of the officers to reach for his gun and order Pinex to show his hands, the reports said.
Chicago police officer investigated for three shootings, two of them fatal - Chicago Tribune
Flanked by nearly two dozen supporters at Daley Plaza, the father of an unarmed man shot and killed by a Chicago police officer called for Anita Alvarez to bring criminal charges against the officer. - Chicago Tribune
