Details in the Laquan Mcdonald shooting continue to come forth, and on Wednesday a Chicago lawyer made the most pointed comments about the case yet. Craig Futterman shared in a radio interview that surveillance video inside the Burger King near where Mcdonald was killed showed a cop erasing footage of the teen ahead of his death.
Futterman, who also works as a law professor for the University of Chicago and founder of the Civil Rights and Police Accountability Project at the school, was a guest on NPR’s Morning Edition program yesterday. Futterman, along with independent journalists Jamie Kalven and Brandon Smith, worked together to secure the release of the graphic shooting video that has rocked Chicago and the rest of the nation.
During the NPR chat, Futterman’s explained how he and the journalists came to work together on the case. The lawyer explained that he received an inside tip from inside the Chicago Police Department, which set him on his quest. But perhaps the most explosive portion of the interview was Futterman’s ending comment.
From NPR:
WERTHEIMER: Now, you – as I understand it, you have found evidence of what the police did when they arrived at the scene. And you were – you described it as a cover-up.
FUTTERMAN: So we also spoke with eyewitnesses who were there. And one of the women who was a witness to the shooting who had – was shocked and who repeatedly screamed, stop shooting, as the officer emptied his gun into the young boy’s body, refused to leave. And she reports that she was taken to the station and placed in a locked room and intimidated and told that she didn’t see what she saw. We then learned, as we interviewed people from Burger King that was located kitty-corner to where this happened – and the Burger King cameras had seven different video files. The officer went into the Burger King, and he erased all seven of those files. The irony is, though, that the Burger King surveillance video was running while the officer erased them. And so there’s a videotape of the officer erasing the video.
City officials and the CPD continue to maintain that there was no tampering evidence found on the Burger King surveillance videos, although they’ve been mum on who conducted the forensic investigation.
Listen to the NPR Morning Edition interview with Craig Futterman in the clip below.
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Photo: ABC7
