Paramedics and firefighters got to the scene only minutes after Quintonio LeGrier and Bettie Jones were fatally shot on the West Side the day after Christmas — but police officers there never told them the shooter was a cop, according to city records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
After the incident, the Chicago Fire Department responders filed four separate reports stressing that they didn’t learn of police involvement in the shooting until long after they’d transported LeGrier, 19, and Jones, 55, to hospitals, where both were pronounced dead.
Three paramedics who were dispatched to the scene of the shooting, in the 4700 block of West Erie Street, said they found out only from news coverage hours later.
“At no time was there a conversation between CFD responders, including myself, and CPD to the circumstances or facts relating to this active incident,” fire Lt. James W. Davis said in a report to his supervisors on Dec. 30, four days after the shooting.
Basileios “Bill” Foutris, an attorney for Antonio LeGrier, Quintonio LeGrier’s father, said the records suggest “something wasn’t on the up and up from the beginning.”
“Why keep that from the paramedics?” Foutris said of the police involvement. “What’s the reason unless you’re hiding something?”
The fire department reports are the latest official accounts raising questions about the incident, including the response to it by the police and, later, the Independent Police Review Authority, the city agency that investigates shootings by cops.
The Cook County medical examiner’s office has said the police waited more than three hours before notifying that agency that an officer had fired the fatal shots, the Sun-Times has previously reported. By then, “too much time had elapsed” for an investigator from the medical examiner’s office to visit the scene, according to an agency spokeswoman.
Quintonio LeGrier. | Provided photo
Joel Brodsky, a lawyer for Officer Robert Rialmo — who shot LeGrier and Jones after he responded to calls about a domestic disturbance — said he wasn’t surprised about the fire department memos. Brodsky noted that the Dec. 26 shooting occurred just weeks after the city made public the 2014 video of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald being shot 16 times by another police officer, prompting widespread outrage.
In that environment, Brodsky said, “Everybody was watching their ass.”
Larry Langford, a fire department spokesman, said the memos were written “to make sure we knew all aspects of the response and patient treatment as we reviewed the incident.”
The department’s emergency responders don’t always need details of a shooting, Langford said, because they “only want to know that a scene is safe and that they can get to and administer to a patient.”
The fire department memos were among a trove of documents released to the Sun-Times in response to a public records request. They offer new details about what happened.
According to a police report, Quintonio LeGrier’s father told a detective that the teenager, who was staying with him while on break from Northern Illinois University, “had been suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and was on medication” but wasn’t taking it.
A little after 4 a.m. the next day, each of the LeGriers called 911. The detective wrote that the father said he did so after Quintonio LeGrier banged on his bedroom door. Antonio LeGrier next called Jones, who lived downstairs, and asked her to open the building’s front door when the police arrived.
Rialmo and his partner, Anthony LaPalermo, said Jones did — and that Quintonio LeGrier then appeared.
Initially Rialmo told detectives the teenager was holding a baseball bat above his head. But in another interview two days later, he added that Quintonio LeGrier swung the bat at him twice, according to police reports. LaPalermo said he did not see LeGrier swing the bat.
Quintonio LeGrier ignored a warning to drop the bat, according to Rialmo, who fired six to eight times as he stepped down the front stairs. Both LeGrier and Jones were hit.
The newly released records show investigators found multiple bullet casings on the sidewalk in front of the building and the home next door — and one on a sidewalk across the street. Brodsky said that’s not surprising given the chaos as first responders arrived. “It’s really easy for it to get kicked and moved,” he said of the casings.
But Foutris and Larry Rogers, a lawyer for Jones’s family, said the way the casings were clustered on the front sidewalk casts doubt on Rialmo’s statements that he fired while stepping down from the porch.
Though police detectives have interviewed Rialmo twice, according to the records, IPRA investigators haven’t spoken with him.
“They haven’t asked,” Brodsky said.
