Psychologist: After Laquan shooting, Van Dyke hesitant to chase man with gun

Three days after he shot and killed 17-year-old Laquan McDonald, Jason Van Dyke was back on the job but opted to hang back as his partner chased a gun-wielding suspect, according statements the former Chicago police officer made during a psychiatric evaluation.

Van Dyke started that shift at the same 7-Eleven where he and partner Joseph Walsh had been parked when they got the call to pursue McDonald in October 2014.

This time, they got a call about officers chasing a man with a gun.

“On the way to the call, Van Dyke recalls having a ‘death grip on the passenger-side door,’ and thinking, ‘I don’t want to go to this,’” psychologist Laurence Miller wrote in a report based on a Skype interview with Van Dyke nearly two years after the fatal shooting.

“His partner ran after the suspect while Van Dyke stood by the car ‘pretending to be looking,’” wrote Miller, who testified at Van Dyke’s trial last fall.

Other officers caught that suspect, and Van Dyke was stripped of his badge and gun and put on “phone duty” days later, while under investigation for the McDonald shooting. Van Dyke told Miller that he wept in the locker room as he prepared to turn in his equipment, and noted that he passed Pulaski Road — where he shot McDonald 16 times — on his way to drop it off.

The report was among hundreds of pages of court records, nearly 90 filings, from Van Dyke’s historic prosecution that were released Wednesday in response to litigation by media organizations, including The Chicago Sun-Times.

The trial, which was conducted under an unusual secrecy, concluded in October with Van Dyke becoming the first Chicago police officer in 50 years to be convicted of murder for an on-duty shooting. Van Dyke is serving a nearly seven-year sentence at a federal prison in upstate New York.

Shortly after the case landed on Cook County Judge Vincent Gaughan’s docket in 2016, the veteran jurist handed down a “decorum order” barring attorneys — and Van Dyke — from speaking publicly about the case, as well as sealing filings in the case.

Gaughan, who had previously presided over high-profile cases including R&B star R. Kelly’s 2008 child pornography trial, had insisted records had to remain out of the public eye to protect witnesses from being “ostracized” and to ensure Van Dyke received a fair trial.

Media lawyers in the ensuing years would successfully lobby the state Supreme Court, leading to some 87 filings that had been sealed becoming public. More than 20 fillings still remain under seal, most because Gaughan has ruled they contain grand jury testimony that must remain secret.

Documents released Wednesday included a motion from Van Dyke’s lawyers to dismiss the case based on allegations — which Gaughan found unconvincing — that former the State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez only charged Van Dyke because of media pressure amid an ultimately unsuccessful political campaign. After losing the Democratic primary to Kim Foxx, Alvarez opted to recuse her office and handed the Van Dyke case over to a special prosecutor. Kane County State’s Attorney Joseph McMahon took over the prosecution, and empaneled a second grand jury that filed a new indictment against Van Dyke.

Miller’s testimony at Van Dyke’s trial centered on the physiological response and changing perception of police officers in high-stress situations, conditions that seemed manifest in Van Dyke’s shooting of McDonald. But buried in the psychologist’s report — though not the version in court files — prosecutors discovered statements Van Dyke made as he and Walsh raced to the scene and before he laid eyes on McDonald, including the remark, “Oh my God, we’re going to have to shoot the guy.”