The mother of a man shot and killed by Chicago
police last year said she has rejected the city’s proposed settlement and wants
it to release dashcam footage of the slaying because it shows her son was
unarmed when he was killed.
The mother of Ronald “Ronnieman” Johnson, Dorothy
Holmes, told reporters during a press conference Tuesday that she has declined
a proposed settlement by the city of Chicago in her federal civil lawsuit over
her son’s death. Holmes said she will not take hush money from a city that has
been doling it out in the millions to cover-up questionable police shootings,
like the $5 million paid to Laquan McDonald’s family this past summer.
“You can’t put a price on my son’s life,” Holmes
said with a shaken voice.
Her son was running through Washington Park on
Oct. 12, 2014, on Chicago’s South Side when Officer George Hernandez shot him
to death. Then, a familiar story was told to the press.
Johnson had a gun, Fraternal Order of Police
spokesman Pat Camden told the media. (Camden is the same de facto cop spokesman
who claimed McDonald “lunged” at police with a knife, causing them to open
fire.) Hernandez was not in uniform and driving an unmarked car when he
responded to a call of shots fired. Johnson became an automatic suspect because
he was running. Camden said Johnson was carrying a gun when at one point he
turned toward Hernandez, causing the officer to shoot.
Holmes and her attorney said they’ve seen the
dashcam video and it shows police are lying.
Johnson is seen sprinting through the park with
nothing in his hands, they said.
“He’s running with palms up,” said William
Calloway, an activist who speaks on behalf of Johnson’s family. “The video’s
not blurry. It’s not grainy. It is clear as day.”
“They killed him and he was unarmed,” he told The
Daily Beast.
Even worse, according to a stunning and volatile
allegation by Holmes’s attorney, is that police framed Johnson after they
killed him by planting a gun on his person.
“Her prerogative the whole time has been to get
this officer arrested and indicted,” Calloway said of Holmes.
On Dec. 10, a federal judge will decide whether
the city must release the video.
The Independent Police Review Agency’s
investigation into Johnson’s death has not been finalized; nor has the agency
cleared its investigations into several other questionable killings by police.
Plus, Holmes’s lawsuit and the success of getting McDonald’s death video
released may prompt other families to start asking hard questions about their
loves ones’ deaths.
Holmes’s press conference began just minutes
after Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced he had essentially fired Superintendent
Garry McCarthy. The move lets Emanuel believe in a political sense that
everything that happened before today—Laquan, Ronnieman, the killing of Rekia
Boyd, and the millions of dollars in settlements handed out as a result of
police misconduct—is behind him.
Today shows there are more problems coming.
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