- Credibility:
LITTLE VILLAGE — The family of Adam Toledo is expected to view footage of Chicago Police fatally shooting the 13-year-old in Little Village sometime next week.
The Civilian Office of Police Accountability will meet with the family to view body camera footage collected from the March 29 shooting sometime next week, attorneys Adeena Weiss Ortiz and Joel Hirschhorn said in a statement Friday. A specific day was not disclosed.
City officials have committed to releasing the footage publicly but not until after Toledo’s family has been able to see it first.
“The City of Chicago, the Chicago Police Department and the Civilian Office of Police Accountability have been very cooperative. We wish to correct speculative reports in the media that suggest otherwise,” Weiss Ortiz and Hirschhorn said in a statement.
Adam Toledo was laid to rest on Friday, attorneys said.
“The family appreciates the outpouring of support and the respect shown for their privacy in this time of mourning,” the attorneys said.
A spokesperson from COPA confirmed the agency has been in contact with Toledo’s family and has agreed to a day next week for the teen’s family to review the footage.
Nearly two weeks since the shooting, details remain sparse.
Officers were responding to a ShotSpotter alert of eight shots fired in the 2300 block of South Sawyer Avenue around 2:30 a.m. March 29 when they saw two “males” in an alley, and one of them had a gun, Brown said. The officers chased, “which resulted in an armed confrontation,” Brown said.
An officer shot once, fatally striking Toledo in his chest.
At a press conference Monday, Police Supt. David Brown refused to answer questions about which of the “males” had a gun. Mayor Lori Lightfoot, however, repeatedly said Toledo had a gun earlier this week.
Lightfoot said the city will use all its resources to track down the origins of the gun and prosecute whoever was responsible for it getting to a child.
“We must take this tragedy as a seminal moment and target all of the factors that allowed it to happen in the first place,” Lightfoot said. “Let’s be clear: An adult put a gun in a child’s hand. A young, impressionable child, and one who should not have been provided with lethal force, a weapon that could — and did — irrevocably change the course of his life. … It’s way past time for us to say, ‘No more.’”
Brown said detectives were stymied in notifying Toledo’s family because he was not carrying any identification and the other person arrested at the scene gave officers the wrong name.
It wasn’t until two days after Toledo was killed that police contacted his mother, Elizabeth Toledo, and told her the description of her son matched that of an unidentified person in the morgue, Brown said.
The shooting is being investigated by COPA. The officers involved have been placed on administrative duty for 30 days.
After initially refusing to release video because of Toledo’s age, the COPA changed course Friday and said it would publicize all the footage within 60 days.
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