Robert Rialmo, Chicago police officer, files a lawsuit against the family of a dead student that he shot, saying the shooting has left him traumatised.
On December 26th 2015, Rialmo responded to a domestic disturbance call that led to him shooting 19-year-old student Quintonio LeGrier and his 55-year-old neighbour Bettie Jones.
The incident later caused the officer “extreme emotional trauma”, and now he is seeking between $50,000 and $10 million in damages.
Following the death, the victim’s father Antonio LeGrier filed a wrongful death lawsuit as his son was unarmed and was not considered a threat.
His lawyer, Basileios Foutris, criticised the officers choice to sue the family and said “That’s a new low even for the Chicago Police Department. First you shoot them, then you sue them.”
The families state that before Rialmo and other officers arrived on the scene, LeGrier’s father asked his downstairs neighbour, Bettie Jones, to keep an eye out for the police and to let them into the two-storey apartment building as soon as they arrived.
According to Rialmo’s counterclaim, Jones answered the front door to the building and told the officer that the disturbance was upstairs, before turning around and heading back to her apartment.
The counterclaim continues stating that as soon as Jones turned to head back to her apartment just a few feet away, he could hear someone running down the stairs towards him.
Rialmo claims that LeGrier came barging out of a door that led to his family’s second-floor apartment holding a baseball bat.
LeGrier then took a full swing with the bat and missed hitting the officer’s head by inches.
Apparently it was so close that the officer could feel the “movement of air as the bat moved in front of his face.”
At which point Rialmo feared for his life and began backing away to the top step of the front porch, repeatedly yelling for LeGrier to drop the bat, but the teen continued to move towards him swinging the bat.
Rialmo said he continued to back away from LeGrier to the bottom step of the front porch of the building, but LeGrier continued to ignore orders to drop the bat and approached the officer with the baseball bat held over his right shoulder.
According to his testimony, after Rialmo’s third attempt to stop the teen swinging at him, he pulled out his 9mm gun and proceeded to shoot LeGrier 8 times, with 6 of the shots striking him.
Northern Illinois University engineering student Quintonio LeGrier, 19.
An autopsy revealed that the fourth shot fired by the officer penetrated through the teens body and continued to strike Bettie Jones once in the chest, killing her accidentally.
Rialmo states that he was unable to see Jones, who was still in the front doorway of the building at the time of the shooting, with the front wall of the building blocking his view.
Bettie Jones, 55.
Lawyers for Antonio LeGrier and Jones say the evidence indicates Rialmo was 20 to 30ft away when he fired, calling into question the officer’s claim he feared for his life.
Foutris also questioned why the teen would have tried to harm the police officer after he himself and his father made the 911 calls, saying ‘If you’re calling multiple times for help are you going to charge a police officer and try to hit him with a bat? That’s ridiculous,”.
Phil Turner, a former federal prosecutor and current defense attorney, said it appeared as though it was intended to intimidate Quintonio’s family and that he has never heard of an officer blaming his shooting victim for causing trauma, stating “That is a known part of the job”.
The U.S. Justice Department is conducting a wide-ranging civil rights investigation, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel has promised a major overhaul of the Police Department and steps to heal its fraught relationship with black residents in an effort demonstrate sensitivity to the community.
This timing and circumstances of this case require extra sensitivity after a video was released last November that showed a white officer, Jason Van Dyke, fatally shoot a black teen, Laquan McDonald, 16 times.
The McDonald family were given $5m by the city.
Rialmo’s attorney, Joel Brodsky, states that “Ever since the McDonald payoff, people are treating officer-involved confrontations like a lottery ticket and they’re waiting to cash it in,” and that it’s important for the public to know that police are ‘not targets for assaults’ and ‘suffer damage like anybody else.’
The families of both victims have filed separate law suits against the city.
