One of the Chicago police officers who opened fire on Joshua Beal in Mount Greenwood in 2016 owned eight guns that were not registered with the Chicago Police Department at the time of the shooting, a violation of department policy.
Attorneys for the city, who are defending Officer Joe Treacy in a lawsuit filed by Beal’s estate, acknowledged in a court filing last month the gun Treacy fired on Nov. 5, 2016, as well as an AR-15 rifle, were among those not registered. City attorneys also disclosed Treacy had known since his time in the police academy the weapons had to be registered.
The Civilian Office of Police Accountability concluded the shooting was justified.
“What they don’t [do] is complete the story and talk about the gun that was used to kill my client,” attorney Blake Horwitz said Thursday. Horwitz represents Beal’s estate.
The racially charged melee unfolded just east of 111th Street and Kedzie Avenue after Beal and several others left a funeral at Mount Hope Cemetery.
In April, COPA found Treacy and police Sgt. Thomas Derouin — another defendant in the Beal estate’s lawsuit — were justified in using deadly force. The COPA decision said it was impossible to tell whether Beal was struck by bullets from one or both of the officers’ guns.
COPA opened another investigation into the gun Treacy used that day. That investigation remains ongoing, a COPA spokesman said Thursday.
Horwitz criticized COPA for conducting parallel investigations instead of looking at the shooting in its totality.
“Instead of calling it an investigation where they sort of investigate everything, what they do is they take a slice of it,” Horwitz said during a news conference Thursday. “It’s very deceitful. They take a slice of the story and say ‘Ah, he’s exonerated.’”
The Beal estate filed an amended lawsuit Wednesday, adding the estate of former Chicago Fire Department paramedic Ryne Kinsella — a former Chicago police officer — as a defendant. The suit, among other charges, accuses Kinsella and Treacy of hurling racial slurs at Beal’s group shortly before the shots were fired.
Speaking with the Chicago Sun-Times last year, Kinsella — who could be seen in video giving Beal chest compressions after he was shot — denied using or hearing any racial epithets the day of the shooting. He took his own life last year.
Treacy and several other officers assigned to a gun team in Area Central were stripped of their police powers in January 2018. Police Sgt. Xavier Elizondo and Officer David Salgado, who were on that same team, were indicted in May 2018 on federal charges that they submitted bogus affidavits for search warrants they would use to rob drug dealers.
Elizondo and Salgado’s trial is scheduled to start Oct. 7. The feds plan to call Treacy to testify as a prosecution witness, court records show.