A woman who witnessed the 2014 Laquan McDonald shooting and said police “pressured” her to change her account of what she saw has settled her lawsuit with the city.
Details of the settlement were not made available and a spokesman for the city’s Law Department declined to comment. The suit was settled earlier this month, a source said.
Alma Benitez was about to place an order at the Burger King drive-thru in the 4000 block of South Pulaski, when she saw police surround an African-American man on foot who was trying to pull up his pants, she said in a 2016 interview with WMAQ-NBC 5.
“He just stood there,” Benitez told the station. “The next thing you know, they shot at him.”
Benitez described the encounter as “super exaggerated.”
“They didn’t need to shoot him,” she told the station.
In her lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in September 2016, Benitez said she was taken into custody without a solid legal reason and that Chicago police officers told her “her account of what she witnessed was ‘not what really happened,’ or words to that effect,” according to the suit.
Officers also told Benitez they had video of the shooting that contradicted her account, the suit states.
“She’s happy to have this chapter reach a resolution, but for her, it was always about the truth,” Benitez’s attorney, Amanda Yarusso, said Friday. She also declined to discuss details of the settlement.
A jury found former Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke guilty in October 2018 of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery for McDonald’s shooting. Cook County Judge Vincent Gaughan sentenced Van Dyke in January to nearly seven years in prison, although he is expected to serve only a little more than three years.
