Chicago officer charged in Laquan McDonald shooting free on bail

Reuters said that the officer was released on Monday evening after his family posted the $150,000 in bond money.

Jason Van Dyke turns himself in Tuesday 11.24.15 went to court today. Prosecutors asked on Monday that the previous ruling stand, but Van Dyke’s lawyer, Daniel Herbert, said his client posed no flight risk.

Last week, Van Dyke was denied bail because the judge wanted to see the video first. Newly-released videos from four police cars at the scene of Laquan McDonald’s shooting are providing additional details on the killing of the 17-year-old in Chicago last year. I will execute aproximately (sic) 16 white male students and or staff, which is the same number of time (sic) Mcdonald (sic) was killed.

McDonald was holding a knife and had slashed the tire of a squad vehicle that had tried to hem him in near the intersection of 41st Street and Pulaski Road. One of the officers, Van Dyke, opens fire from close range.

Van Dyke then fired 16 rounds at McDonald in about 14 seconds and was reloading when another officer told him to hold his fire, prosecutors said at bond court.

Van Dyke, 37, wore a brown Department of Corrections jumpsuit and showed no expression when his bond was announced at the hearing. But for the police camera that was recording the event, Van Dyke may have claimed that he shot the teenager in self-defense; that he was so much afraid for his life that he had no choice but to put down his assailant. He said Van Dyke is “very scared about the consequences he is facing”.

Officer Thomas Sweeney, a police spokesman, was not aware of any police reports filed by stores related to the protesters’ blockades.

“We were impacted negatively”, said a manager at Forever 21, 540 N. Michigan Ave.

At the news conference, Alvarez said she had made her decision to charge Van Dyke “internally” weeks before the judge ordered the video released to the public.

Chicago Police Superintendent, Gary McCarthy, acknowledged the largely peaceful nature of the protest matches, while conceding that “people have a right to be angry, people have a right to protest, people have a right to free speech”. Police said the teen had lunged at officers and didn’t heed orders to drop the knife.

The announcement comes as city leaders – including Emanuel – face mounting criticism over the handling of the Laquan McDonald case. A police spokesman says there were three arrests during the demonstration, two of them traffic related and the third resulted from a battery, but he didn’t elaborate.

The Chicago Tribune cited a Police source saying a person from NY alerted the police after reading a comment on a Worthstarhiphop.com of a person that warned he planned to kill 16 students on the University of Chicago campus on Monday.