Chicago Police Rolled Out a Cover-Up After Killing a 13-Year-Old Latino Boy

“The police are never going to tell the truth at all.”

Police at the scene the morning after Adam Toledo was killed.

Antonio Perez/TNS/Zuma

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Last Sunday, Elizabeth Toledo was relieved to see her 13-year-old son, Adam, walk in the door of their West Chicago home. She’d filed a missing-person report with police a day before, but he returned in time to join his mom at a relative’s memorial service. That night she put him to bed in a room he shared with his brother, grateful he was back.

The next morning, he wasn’t there. Adam Toledo had gone out, and in the middle of the night, around 2:30 a.m., Chicago police shot and killed the seventh-grade boy in an alley behind a high school, not far from his home in Little Village. But nobody told Elizabeth, who thought he’d gone missing again.

When the police finally reached out to her on Wednesday, a full two days after the shooting, they requested a photo of Adam. She assumed it was related to her earlier missing-person report. A half hour later, they knocked on her door and asked her to go to the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office to identify his body. “I couldn’t even see him; they showed me a picture of my son Adam for just a couple of seconds,” she told Block Club Chicago. According to her attorney, she wasn’t told how he died—he was shot in the chest—until she met with authorities later.

In the days after Chicago police killed the boy, Elizabeth Toledo wasn’t the only one kept in the dark; city officials were also slow to provide key details to the public. In a carefully constructed statement issued hours after the shooting, the police department only revealed that officers had seen “two males in a nearby alley,” and that one of them was armed and began to flee. (The other person in the alley was a 21-year-old man.) A “foot pursuit…resulted in a confrontation,” and an officer “fired his weapon, striking the offender in the chest.” Along with these bare details, the police department tweeted a photo of a gun they said was recovered at the scene.

On Thursday, Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown clarified that the so-called male “offender” who was shot by police was a juvenile. But even then, according to Carlos Ballesteros, a reporter at Chicago-based Injustice Watch, he did not yet specify the boy was just 13 years old; it took reporters digging through an autopsy ledger to break the news about his age that day, according to Lakeidra Chavis, a Chicago-based reporter at the Trace, which covers gun violence. “Someone knew early on the person shot was actually a young teenager. That information was omitted while crafting a self-defense narrative,” she tweeted.

The city also delayed the release of body-cam footage that captured the shooting. Initially, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which investigates police shootings, said the video could not be released because Adam Toledo was just a juvenile. On Friday, the agency reversed its position: It had made a mistake, it stated, and would release it within 60 days. Toledo’s family confirmed they would be shown the footage next week. “The public deserves a complete window into the split-second decisions our officers are forced to make,” Superintendent Brown tweeted Friday.

The obfuscation echoes the city’s response to the 2014 police killing of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, another minor from Chicago’s West Side. Officer Jason Van Dyke, who is white, shot and killed McDonald, who was Black, while responding to a call about alleged car break-ins, and initially claimed the teen lunged at him with a knife. “City officials waited more than a year to release police dash-cam footage of the shooting—and did so only after a judge ruled in favor of an independent journalist whose public records requests were repeatedly denied,” Brandon Patterson reported for Mother Jones at the time. The video showed that Van Dyke shot McDonald 16 times, even after the teen had fallen to the ground, and sparked widespread protests and calls for then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel to resign. In 2018, Van Dyke was found guilty of second-degree murder, as well as 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm.

After more details of Adam Toledo’s death became known this week, Alderwoman Rossana Rodriguez told Block Club that incidents like the case have left her with little trust for the police. “For a very long time the police have been taken at their word. We’re not accepting that anymore,” she said. “You shot a 13 year old.”

“We’ve figured out the police are never going to tell the truth at all or they’re only going to share what makes them look good,” she added.

The officer who killed Adam has been placed on administrative duty for 30 days. On Friday night, a small group of protesters marched through Logan Square demanding justice. In a news conference earlier that day, Elizabeth Toledo said she wants to know the truth about why the officer fired a bullet into her son. “I just want to know what really happened to my baby,” she said, crying. An attorney said Adam had no criminal history, and that he once dreamed of becoming a police officer himself. Elizabeth Toledo recalled him as being a happy kid who loved animals, and said he was far too young.

“He still played with Hot Wheels,” she said in tears.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate