Chicago police and prosecutors caught lying as they cover up their murder of Darius Pinex
Darius Pinex, alive and well, before being murdered by the Chicago Police Department
Police said officers pulled over 27-year-old Darius Pinex just after 1:30 a.m. after noticing his vehicle matched the description of one used in an earlier shots fired call.Except this was a complete fabrication. New evidence shows that the arresting officers, their superior officers, and prosecutors all knew this wasn't true and that the car Pinex was driving didn't match the vehicle they claimed it did.
Hours after the fatal shooting of the driver of an Oldsmobile Aurora, two Chicago police officers assigned to one of the city's most dangerous neighborhoods explained to investigators why they had pulled the car over early that morning and approached with their guns drawn. "Well, this um, the car we were approaching fit the description of a vehicle that was wanted from a shooting in another district," Officer Gildardo Sierra said in a recorded statement to investigators from the city agency that investigates police shootings, records show. "It came across the wire from our ... police radios."A second account of the day confirms this, and that the lawyer for the city in the civil case, Jordan Marsh, also knowingly concealed it.
Now, nearly five years later, their account of what precipitated the encounter with Darius Pinex at that dark Englewood intersection has fallen apart amid allegations of a cover-up by the police and the city. The controversy threatens to overturn a jury verdict in the officers' favor, potentially exposing the city to millions of dollars in liability.
But that dispatch actually aired in a different radio zone, so the officers did not hear it, according to court records. A different call that aired in the officers' zone involved an Oldsmobile Aurora that didn't match Pinex's car and wasn't wanted in a shooting. Marsh recently admitted under oath that he violated court rules by failing to turn over that recording, and he did not tell other members of his trial team, records show.Let's make sure this is clear ... 1. Police lied about why they ever pulled Darius Pinex over in the first place, and
2. When the family sued the city over his death, attorneys for the city knowingly concealed evidence. The family ended up not receiving any settlement from the city.
More below.
Now, we've also learned that the officers investigating Darius Pinex's shooting switched off of the publicly recorded dispatch radio to discuss their lies.
About an hour after the shooting, their supervisor at the scene, Sgt. Jeffrey Siwek, called an emergency dispatcher over his police radio to ask why the Aurora had been wanted, court records show. That's when a peculiar thing happened. Against protocol, the two moved the conversation off police public frequencies that are monitored and recorded.Clearly, they knew exactly what they were doing when they switched off of this line. As it turns out, Officer Gildardo Sierra is very familiar with how all of this goes. Darius Pinex was not the first unarmed black man he killed. He shot another black man sixteen times after mistaking his cell phone for a gun.
"Do you want, um, do you want us to just call you? Would that be better?" asked the dispatcher, according to the records.
"Yeah, you ready for my number?" Siwek said.
No comments:
Post a Comment