- Credibility:
CHICAGO — A controversial Chicago Police officer who killed two people in 2016 was involved in a fight at a bar just two days after being acquitted in another bar fight case, officials said.
The Friday morning fight was the second for which Officer Robert Rialmo has been investigated. Rialmo was charged — and found not guilty on Tuesday — in a December 2017 case where prosecutors said he’d punched two men at a Northwest Side bar.
At 3:40 a.m. Friday, officers were called to a report of a battery in the 7100 block of West Higgins Avenue, according to Chicago Police spokesman Tom Ahern. The incident started as an argument between three men but turned into a fight, and all three men called police.
One of the men was Rialmo, who was off duty at the time.
No one has been charged in the incident as of Friday afternoon. The Civilian Office of Police Accountability and the Police Department’s Internal Affairs Bureau are investigating.
Rialmo first gained attention when he fatally shot Bettie Jones and Quintonio LeGrier in December 2015. In the incident, LeGrier, 19, approached officers with a baseball bat as they responded to a domestic disturbance. Rialmo fired, hitting LeGreir and accidentally striking Jones. Both were killed.
In June, city attorneys reached a proposed $16 settlement with the family of Jones, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Weeks later, jurors found that Rialmo shot LeGrier without justification and awarded the family just over $1 million, according to a Tribune report. But in a interrogatory, jurors held that Rialmo had reasonably believed he had to fire to prevent death or bodily harm, and faced with the contradictory findings, the judge in that case ruled for the city and Rialmo, wiping away the verdict and damages.
