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Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke took the witness stand in his own defense Tuesday, testifying in a quavering voice and at times through tears that he had no choice but to shoot 17-year-old Laquan McDonald as the teen advanced on him with a knife.
Van Dyke’s long-awaited sworn account of the shooting that rocked Chicago was considered crucial for a case that hinges on whether the officer reasonably feared for his safety when he fired all 16 rounds in his gun at McDonald, many while the teen lay prone and motionless on the ground.
In his hour and a half on the stand, Van Dyke, 40, seemed to repeatedly contradict what can been seen on the now-infamous police dashboard camera video of the shooting, including that McDonald raised a knife at him before he fired, that he stopped firing soon after the teen spun and dropped to the road and that McDonald continued to try to get up with the knife in his hand.
The video shows Van Dyke continuing to fire for more than 12 seconds after McDonald fell to the street and appeared not to move except from the bullets striking him.
Dressed in a gray suit and cornflower-blue tie, Van Dyke kept a crumpled handkerchief on the witness stand in front of him and occasionally blew his nose during the testimony. He first grew emotional when he described how McDonald raised the knife across his chest with a wild look in his eyes before Van Dyke opened fire.
“(His) eyes were bugging out. His face was just expressionless,” Van Dyke said. “He turned his torso towards me. … He waved the knife from his lower right side upwards across his body towards his left shoulder.”
Van Dyke’s voice started to waver.
“I shot him,” he said.
In testimony earlier Tuesday, a defense psychologist said Van Dyke told him how as he and his partner were headed to the scene that night Van Dyke had already wondered aloud why other officers hadn’t shot McDonald after he “attacked” a squad car with a knife and punctured a tire.
Dr. Laurence Miller, a police psychologist who interviewed Van Dyke about the shooting on behalf of the officer’s defense team, recounted how shortly before arriving at the scene Van Dyke told his partner, “Oh my God, we are going to have to shoot the guy.”
Miller testified that he felt Van Dyke was justified in shooting McDonald, saying the officer “responded to what he perceived was a deadly threat, responded in a way based on his training, in a way that was designed to neutralize that threat as he understood it.”
But while Miller’s testimony helped bolster the contention that Van Dyke shot McDonald in self-defense, his recounting of what Van Dyke told his partner right before the shooting could be damaging to the defense’s case, especially if the jury determines that Van Dyke made up his mind to shoot before even arriving at the scene.
During Van Dyke’s appearance on the witness stand, assistant special prosecutor Jody Gleason quickly pounced on him during cross-examination, challenging his account of McDonald raising the knife before being shot.
“You’ve sat here for several days,” Gleason said. “Where do you see it on the video?”
“The video doesn’t show my perspective,” answered Van Dyke, repeating a common theme of the defense throughout the trial.
Gleason then showed Van Dyke the animated video created by the defense that was intended to show the shooting from the officer’s perspective. She asked where McDonald lifted the knife in the computer-generated model. Van Dyke said the defense’s own video also didn’t depict what he saw.
She also challenged the even more aggressive account of McDonald’s actions purportedly given by Van Dyke to a detective at the scene.
Van Dyke acknowledged he spoke with a detective, but he said he could not recall what he said immediately after the shooting.
“I was still in shock,” he said.
Gleason also questioned why Van Dyke didn’t use the six seconds between the time he got out of his squad car and the time he opened fire to move away from McDonald or take cover behind the car.
“In that six seconds, he got a lot closer to me,” Van Dyke said.
Gleason pointed out that the video showed Van Dyke took a step closer to McDonald, despite his initial claims that he backpedaled as McDonald came closer.
“I know that now, yeah,” he said. “Not intentionally. I thought I was backpedaling.”
“What?” Gleason asked with a tone of incredulity.
“Miss, I thought I was backpedaling,” Van Dyke said.
“You thought you were backpedaling after you fired shot after shot after shot?” Gleason asked.
Van Dyke is charged with two counts of first-degree murder, 16 counts of aggravated battery and one count of official misconduct in the shooting, the first time in decades a Chicago police officer has been charged with murder in an on-duty shooting.
Prosecutors have said Van Dyke had no legal justification to fire even one shot that night let alone 16.
Van Dyke’s attorneys, meanwhile, have argued that the shooting was a clear-cut case of self-defense.
Van Dyke’s testimony marked the first time the jury got to hear what he allegedly saw and heard the night of the shooting in October 2014. He testified that on the way to the scene that night, he heard his fellow officers call for help, then a dispatcher asked for a car with a Taser. He said he first saw McDonald running through a Burger King parking lot at 41st Street and Pulaski Road. After his partner, Officer Joseph Walsh, jumped their squad car over the curb, they followed McDonald onto Pulaski.
Van Dyke said he initially opened the passenger side door to try to knock McDonald over but was unsuccessful. However, the prosecutor pointed out that the video showed the squad car was far too distant from McDonald at that point for Van Dyke to accomplish such a move.
As they pulled further up, Van Dyke said he saw McDonald “extend out a knife, flicking it toward his side.” He then jumped out of the car with his gun drawn and ordered McDonald to drop the knife, but he did not respond other than to blankly stare at him, he said.
“His face had no expression. His eyes were just bugging out of his head. He had these huge white eyes just staring right through me,” he told jurors. “I was yelling at him drop the knife. I was yelling at him I don’t know how many times.”
Van Dyke’s chin began to tremble.
“He got probably about 10 to 15 feet away from me,” he continued.
“We never lost eye contact,” said Van Dyke, then pausing at length.
In a quavering voice, Van Dyke said he continued to fire after McDonald fell to the street and he saw him push his hand off the pavement with the knife still in his hand.
“I could see him starting to push up with his left hand off the ground, and I see his left shoulder start to come up. And I still see him holding that knife with his right hand, not letting go of it, and his eyes are still bugged out, his face had no expression on it … I’m yelling at him drop that knife.”
“I just kept on looking at the knife, and I shot at it,” he said. “I just wanted him to get rid of that.”
Van Dyke said he began to reload his weapon because that’s what he had been trained to do, but he stopped when his partner told him it wasn’t necessary.
“He said, ‘Jason, I got this,’” he said.
Van Dyke said he watched Walsh kick the knife out of McDonald’s hand. Once that threat was eliminated, he called for help, he told the jury.
“I screamed into the radio ‘we need an ambulance,’” he said.
Van Dyke said during his testimony that McDonald never turned his back on officers, despite prosecutors insisting he was “walking away.”
“He could have made a decisive turn and walked in the opposite direction,” he said. “He could have thrown that knife away and ended it all right then and there.”
Gleason, the prosecutor, rephrased the question moments later.
“And you could have ended it all the minute he hit the ground, correct?” she asked.
Van Dyke said he took that amount of time for him to “reassess” the situation.
“But you testified that even when you reassessed the situation, you continued to shoot him,” she said.
“Because to me it seemed like he was getting back up,” he said.
Chicago Tribune’s Christy Gutowski contributed.
Complete Jason Van Dyke trial coverage available here »
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