Chicago Police Commander On Trial After Allegations Of Assault Surface [VIDEO]

Prosecutors have alleged that Glenn Evans, one of the department’s 22 district commanders before he was charged and placed on paid desk duty, chased Rickey Williams into an abandoned South Side building, shoved the barrel of his service weapon “deep down” Williams’ throat, held a Taser to his groin and threatened to kill him.

The chief evidence against Evans appears to be the recovery of Williams’ DNA from the barrel of the service weapon. But the defense contends that the DNA just as easily could have come from Williams touching the gun during his arrest in January 2013.

The trial, expected to last a week or less at the Leighton Criminal Court Building, comes amid a public furor after the release last month of the dash-cam video capturing a white Chicago police officer shooting Laquan McDonald, a black teen, 16 times.

The officer, Jason Van Dyke, fired many of the shots after McDonald, 17, had fallen mortally wounded to the street. Van Dyke was charged with first-degree murder just hours before the video was released on the order of a Cook County judge. More than a year had passed since the October 2014 killing.

The shocking footage led to the firing of police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, calls for the resignation of Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez and repeated protests, including one that shut down high-end Magnificent Mile stores on one of the busiest shopping days of the Christmas season.

Another video of a Chicago police officer fatally shooting Ronald Johnson III as he ran from officers was released this week as Alvarez announced that no charges would be filed in that case.

And while Evans goes on trial at the county criminal courthouse at 26th Street and California Avenue, two other Chicago police misconduct cases will unfold at the same time before juries at the Dirksen U.S. Courthouse downtown. In one of those cases, three women on their way home from the Chicago Pride Parade in 2007 alleged an off-duty Chicago police officer hurled anti-gay slurs and physically attacked them on the shoulder of the Stevenson Expressway following a road rage encounter.

“I wouldn’t want to be trying a police misconduct case in this climate, I can tell you that,” Chicago criminal defense attorney Peter Hickey, who has represented numerous police officers over his nearly 40-year career, said of the timing of Evans’ trial. “This is absolutely the worst that I can remember seeing it.”

But like most Chicago police officers facing criminal charges, Evans, 53, has opted to let a judge, not a jury, decide his fate on two counts of aggravated battery and seven counts of official misconduct.

The judge rejected media requests for the high-profile trial to be covered with cameras in the courtroom as part of a pilot project underway in Cook County. She granted audio coverage, however.

The trial will mark an important test for Alvarez, who is in the midst of a tough re-election battle. Her office lost its last major prosecution of a Chicago cop. Detective Dante Servin was acquitted in April of involuntary manslaughter charges on a legal technicality after Judge Dennis Porter ruled prosecutors had not charged him properly. Servin was off duty in 2012 when he claimed a man pulled a gun on him. He shot over his shoulder from inside his car, wounding the man and killing 22-year-old Rekia Boyd in an alley near Servin’s West Side home.

Evans’ trial lacks the racial component of many police misconduct cases. Both he and the alleged victim are black.

Community leaders in the South Side and West Side districts where Evans worked as commander praised his tough approach, particularly his willingness to regularly work the streets himself, highly unusual for an officer of his rank.

But a Tribune analysis of internal Police Department records showed dozens of citizen complaints had been filed against Evans from January 2006 through July 2014, a period in which he was promoted from sergeant to lieutenant and then again to commander. He amassed 36 complaints in all, far more than anyone else of his rank and exceeded by only 34 officers in the entire 12,000-strong department. Yet he was never disciplined for any of those complaints, the records showed.

But Judge Diane Cannon, who will decide Evans’ fate, has barred prosecutors from putting on evidence about his history of complaints and lawsuits, saying they are too dated and irrelevant to the charges.

Hickey and other defense attorneys said the DNA evidence will be difficult for the defense to overcome. But Evans’ attorneys have said the DNA simply means Williams came into contact with the service weapon during his arrest.

The judge, herself a former veteran prosecutor, also seemed to question the DNA’s significance during a hearing in August.

“Who would hand over evidence of a crime willingly?” she asked about Evans turning over his handgun to investigators at police headquarters.

Last week, Evans’ attorneys told the judge that they plan to make the .45-caliber Smith & Wesson semi-automatic handgun a defense exhibit at the trial. The gun was returned to Evans at some point after the DNA had been recovered.

The defense is alleging that an investigation into the alleged assault by the Independent Police Review Authority, the civilian agency that investigates serious allegations of police misconduct, was tainted by an investigator who was later fired.

Prosecutors have said Evans was on patrol one afternoon in January 2013 in the Park Manor neighborhood because of a recent shooting.

Evans said he saw Williams, then 22, holding a blue steel handgun while he stood near a bus stop in the 500 block of East 71st Street.

Williams has denied being armed and instead contended that Evans had pulled up in a squad car and stared at him for several minutes. Unnerved, he took off running, he said.

Evans radioed for assistance for a “man with a gun” and gave chase on foot as Williams ducked into the abandoned house.

Williams’ lawsuit alleged that as many as 10 other officers responded to the scene.

Prosecutors allege that Evans tackled Williams in the abandoned house and stuck the barrel of his gun down Williams’ throat as he threatened to kill him.

“Mother——, tell me where the guns are,” prosecutors quoted Evans as saying.

Police conducted what prosecutors called “a systematic search” of the house and surrounding area but found no gun. Still, Williams was charged with misdemeanor reckless conduct.

Williams did not seek medical attention, but prosecutors said he suffered severe soreness to his throat that lasted several days.

The next day, Williams contacted IPRA and filed a complaint against Evans, making the allegations about the gun, Taser and death threat.

The misdemeanor charge against Williams was dropped almost three months later when no officers appeared in court.

After the state crime lab recovered Williams’ DNA from Evans’ service weapon, IPRA recommended to then-Superintendent McCarthy in April 2014 that Evans be removed from his commander’s post. But McCarthy, who had publicly praised Evans for his aggressive style and promoted him, kept Evans in place until hours before he was charged in August 2014. Evans has been on paid desk duty since then.