$3.5M Settlement: White Cicero Cops Shot Latino Man in Back, Left Him for Dead, Planted Gun & Threatened Witnesses

From [HERE] and [HERE] and [HERE] It was an inside job. It had to be. And the Chicago Police Department had better get to the bottom of it.

It is bad enough that our city is awash with illegal guns. But to think that the cops themselves might be the source of some of those guns — or of even one. That would be a new low. The onus is on Police Supt. Eddie Johnson to solve this one or watch the public’s trust in our local police crumble just a little more.

Five years ago, according to a Better Government Association report in Sunday’s Sun-Times, a handgun turned up next to the body of a gang member who was shot to death by a Cicero police officer. Whether the gun belonged to the young man or was planted by the Cicero cop seems to be a matter of dispute, but what is clear is that the gun once was in the custody of the Chicago Police — and it was supposed to have been destroyed.

Thirteen years ago, a Cook County judge, William Stewart Boyd, had turned the gun over to the Chicago Police as part of a buyback program meant to take weapons off the street. Judge Boyd turned in the gun, a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, and received a prepaid Visa card worth something less than $100.

As the BGA reports, the Chicago Police recover thousands of guns each year through buybacks, and confiscate thousands more when making arrests. The guns are supposed to be destroyed. But the gun the judged had turned in mysteriously popped up again in Cicero, at the scene of the shooting of 22-year-old Cesar A. Munive.

That shooting has a particularly bad feel about it. The Cicero police officer had a history of disciplinary problems, the victim’s family claimed in a civil rights suit that the officer shot an unarmed man, and the Cicero Town Council voted a few weeks ago to pay the family $3.5 million to settle the case.

The lawsuit in federal court alleged that Cicero police shot him in the back as he rode a bicycle and let him bleed to death, then planted a gun by him, "threatened to kill" a witness, and intimidated and arrested other witnesses.  G. Cesar Munive, father of the late son Cesar Munive, sued the Town of Cicero, its "police Officer Dominick Schullo "and other unknown Cicero police officers for conspiracy, recklessness, excessive force and other charges. 

The suit states: "On Thursday, July 5, 2012, Cesar Munive was riding his bike at the corner of 13th Street and 57th Avenue. A police officer drove at a high rate of speed, and pulled onto the curb and parkway at the corner. He jumped out of his car and without lawful cause or justification shot the unarmed decedent, Cesar Munive, once in the back.

After being shot the decedent screamed in pain and yelled that he had not done anything. The decedent fell down to the grass, bleeding. As Mr. Munive lay on the ground bleeding, the defendant officers forcefully handcuffed him with his hands behind his back and dragged him on the ground and delayed seeking medical attention. As a result of defendant Schullo's unlawful use of force, Munive suffered pain during his last conscious moments. The fatal police shooting was totally unjustified. Mr. Munive never did anything which could have justified the use of deadly force." Munive says his son "bled to death on the scene."

And he says that was not the end of the police abuse/ "Following the shooting, Defendant Schullo and other unknown members of the Cicero Police Department took actions designed to conceal and cover up the fact that Defendant Schullo shot an unarmed citizen, including planting a weapon at the shooting site and engaging in a pattern of intimidating witnesses, arresting witnesses without cause, calling witnesses on the telephone in the middle of the night, shining lasers into the windows of the home of a witness, Pedro Dominguez, threatening to kill Mr. Dominguez, and stopping vehicles and detaining relatives approaching Mr. Dominquez's home," the complaint states. [MORE]

But our question today has to do with the gun. How did it go from Chicago Police custody in 2004 to the scene of police-involved shooting in 2012?

When the police take a gun off the street, you would like to believe its killing days are over. [MORE]