On Monday night, 16-year-old Pierre Loury was shot in the back by a cop as he fled on foot while trying to scale a fence.
He is yet another Chicago teen who has died at the hands of the police.
Officers say that Loury was sought after when a car he was in was pulled over because it matched the description of a vehicle involved in an earlier shooting.
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The Chicago Tribune referred to an eyewitness who said Loury was shot mid-air.
“They shot him in the air,” she said. “His pants leg got caught on the fence and he hit the ground. If he hadn’t gotten shot, he would have cleared the fence.”
An autopsy report showed that Loury was shot in the chest after the lone officer responsible for his death said the teen turned and pointed a gun at him during the pursuit. Chicago First Deputy Superintendent John Escalante said a semi-automatic weapon was recovered at the scene.
The shooting happened just days before news was released of a Chicago Police Department Task Force finding that officers “have no regard” for the lives of African-Americans and Hispanics, The Washington Post reports.
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A 22-page report detailed that data collected from 2008 to 2015 involving more than 400 shootings showed that three-quarters of the victims wounded or killed in those incidents were indeed black. 14 percent of those involved were Hispanic and only eight percent were white.
Killings of Black men in altercations with police officers, from Chicago in particular has been a serious problem as of late, one that Mayor Rahm Emanuel is constantly conscious of.
“I don’t think you need a task force to know that we have racism in America, we have racism in Illinois or that there is racism that exists in the city of Chicago and obviously can be in our departments,” he said. “The question isn’t, ‘Do we have racism?’ We do. The question is, ‘what are you going to do about it?'”
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Loury’s family members, including his mother and aunt, Tambrasha Hudson and Karen Winters, have spoken out about his death.
“Everything they said on the news is not the truth,” Hudson said. “It’s sad! My baby was 16!
Winters shared sentiments about the climate of violence to which which young Black men are exposed.
“Once again, we’re looking at environment, this community, how some of these young boys are just plagued with certain influences,” she said.
People protested in front of the police station where the officers who were a part of the shooting worked. Community members gathered on the street where Loury was killed and others ventured onto the expressway forcing police to stop traffic.
The Loury incident has become the fifth police-involved shooting in the four months of this year and the third fatal one.
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