Chicago Cop Who Fatally Shot Laquan McDonald Pleads Not Guilty

Jason Van Dyke. Image by Getty Images
A Chicago police officer had pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the shooting of a black teenager, an incident caught on video that has led to protests and calls for the resignation of Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
In a Chicago courtroom, officer Jason Van Dyke formally pleaded not guilty Tuesday to six charges of murder and one charge of official misconduct in the 2014 death of Laquan McDonald, 17.
Emanuel, the city’s first Jewish mayor, is set to return from Cuba later Tuesday. He was on a family vacation that was to last until Saturday but announced Monday he was cutting it short after the shooting deaths of two more black Chicagoans by his police force.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
