The whole truth about what happened under the “L” tracks in River North early on July 30 died when Joseph Gould, a homeless black man with a little cocaine and a little alcohol in his blood and some good and some bad in his life, hit the street for the last time.
The official cause: a contact gunshot wound to the left side of the head, exiting the back of the head. The bullet was fired from a 9 mm Beretta semiautomatic owned by a white Chicago police officer, Gregory Becker.
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This has become a shot heard ’round the city, sparking first a collection of charges against the cop, then an explosive ruling from a Cook County judge after conflicting testimony from witnesses, then a political backlash and now an investigation that will use grand-jury subpoena powers.
On the surface, it is at the very least a novel about the tough ways of the big city, hard-living cops, street people, confused testimony, a conflicted judge, wimpering politicians, hopeful do-gooders and the ruthless efficiency of 9 mm auto-firing pistols.
But to examine this case and its troubling details is to learn very quickly about the messiness of both life and law and to see how one shot after midnight can rip through a collection of seemingly unconnected lives.
A contact wound is just what it sounds like. The barrel of the gun is so close to the flesh when it is fired that all of the round’s detritus-the burned powder, traces of chemicals, dirt, lead-end up inside the wound.
And so it was with the wound that killed Joseph Gould, 36, of no one knows quite where, at about 12:30 a.m. July 30. The medical examiner found the copper sheathing of the bullet inside his brain, but no bullet and no other remarkable external injuries.
Gould was no St. Francis, that is for certain. He almost seems a character sent from central casting to play a key role in a production called “No Innocent Victims”-which is one of the big problems with the case.
He had a long rap sheet, problems with alcohol and dope and misbehavior. There was trouble in his family. His brother was killed by a police officer in 1983. To some, undoubtedly, he seemed scary, even in the daytime. As with most people, he has been more fondly recalled in death than he was ever embraced in his adult life.
Was he dangerous? Was he violent? The record doesn’t say much about that. He had a lot of arrests for urinating in the street, bothering people and sleeping where he shouldn’t. Downtown cops knew who he was, the way they know many of the homeless people who pick their way around.
He had his admirers and friends, too, business people who hired him to wash their windows.
They remembered a dependable character, excited about window washing, who seemed very interested in training and helping other people until he literally dropped out of sight two years ago.
He sold StreetWise (vendor No. 1579), a newspaper sold by the homeless, where undoubtedly he came into contact with people who wanted him to get his life in order. His death has sparked a campaign among other vendors and editors at the paper to press for justice.
What possessed him to follow Gregory Becker into the night on July 30 is one of those matters that can’t be known with any degree of satisfaction. Even the answer to that simple question is obscured. What happened is he ended up getting shot in the head with Becker’s gun and was left to die in the street.
Becker and his girlfriend drove away, abandoning, it is charged, his Chicago cop’s code of conduct and breaking a whole raft of department regulations about fired weapons, gunshot wounds and tending to the dying, all at once.
And that is how this all began.
The People of the State of Illinois vs. Gregory Becker, Defendant, Case No. 95 MC 1 141292 landed in front of Associate Judge Robert Bastone in Cook County Circuit Court on the morning of Sept. 6 for a preliminary hearing.
This is where the passion and messiness of middle-of-the-night streetplay gets buffed and polished into the language of law, with its motions and objections and overrulings and such. It is an attempt to force the meaty grindings of experience into the sausage skin of reason, not necessarily a comfortable process to watch.
This much is not in dispute: Gould follows Becker, who is white, and his girlfriend, who is black, perhaps after spilling water from his automobile window-washing bucket on her. Becker gets his gun from the trunk of his car. There is a tussle. Maybe he hits Gould on the side of the head with his gun. There is a shot. Gould falls to the street. Becker and the woman leave.
What that becomes in court is a first-degree murder charge, withdrawn before the preliminary hearing because some of the parts for a first-degree case clearly are missing. There is no evidence that this was planned. It is reduced to an involuntary-manslaughter charge. Then there are five counts of official misconduct.
Although this will not come out in court, the argument is that it is an accident that the gun went off, and Becker didn’t know that the bullet hit anyone.
Life and law are full of coincidences.
Flash back to 1965. A yellowing, crumbly little newspaper clipping tells about another gunshot accident. Look at the headline: “Boy Dies of Wound from Gun of Friend.”
Sept. 28, 1965.
Peter Vincent Di Maria, 15, of North Olcott Avenue in Niles dies at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge of a gunshot wound to the head. The details are all there, along with funeral plans. He was shot by Robert P. Bastone, now Judge Bastone.
It is a very sad story, recalls Ed Dennis, the retired Niles police captain who investigated the shooting. Bastone and Di Maria were in the basement family room of the Bastone house listening to the Notre Dame game on the radio.
Bastone’s dad had been a state trooper, and the boys found his service revolver in a bag in the basement. Robert was showing the gun to his friend when it went off.
“Mr. Dennis, he didn’t mean it,” the dying boy told the detective at the hospital. “It was an accident. He was showing me the gun.”
The coroner’s inquest concludes that it was all an accident, the sadness undoubtedly lingers, along with an eventual awareness that accidents are a part of life, however unfortunate.
End of flashback.
Court on this September morning was all business.
There was a trio of assistant state’s attorneys, Mike McHale, Adrienne D. Mebane and Dan Rabinovitz. Pat O’Brien was there to defend Becker.
The witnesses were Joey Preston, the self-described “girlfriend” of the married police officer; Officer Robert Smith of the Chicago Police Department crime lab; Detective Patrick Flynn, the investigator; Dr. Adrienne Segovia, the medical examiner on the case; and Nick Schaffer, Ramon Sandoval and Ernest Edwards, who saw the incident.
What they had to say takes some telling, but it is important. Even if one asked a handful of people to watch an event, their stories would be varied. The stories would be even more varied if they happened to independently notice something was going on.
Joey Preston
She is 23 and testifies that Becker has been her boyfriend for three years. Just after midnight before the shooting, she says, she and Becker were leaving America’s Bar on Erie Street. They headed west on Erie and then went north on Franklin Street. The car was parked at Huron Street, she says.
A person she describes as a “guy” approaches Becker first, and then her. “He started mumbling. Calling me a bitch and started walking towards me,” she testifies. She describes him as a black male “a little bit taller than me. Black hair. He was dressed real bad . . .”
He was walking toward her, she says, when Becker intervened and said, ” `Why don’t you get the f— away,’ and came back and pushed him away from me.” Becker also told the man he was a Chicago police officer, she says. When they got to the car, she testifies, the man was still behind them.
They went to the trunk of the car, she says, to get her purse and his police pistol, a 9 mm Beretta semiautomatic. While Becker was “getting things out” of the trunk, the man was still standing there, mumbling, she testifies.
“When he started to get close to Greg (Becker), how close did he get to Greg?” Mebane asks.
“He got close enough to grab at his gun,” she says.
She describes a struggle.
“At the point they were struggling with it, Greg wasn’t standing side by side with me anymore. He was trying to get his gun. Retrieve it from the guy that had grabbed it,” she says.
That changes with further questioning. He was not actually trying to retrieve the gun, but both men had their hands on the gun. There was “something like a firecracker. A boom sound.” She looked up in the air, she says, and when she looked back, the man with Becker “all of a sudden grabbed his stomach, curled up, laid down on the ground.”
“What happened after he did that?” the prosecutor asks.
“I said, `Come on, Greg. I am ready to go home. I am tired of this.’ “
So they left.
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In the car, she says, Becker told her, “I can’t believe the gun went off. . . . This gun is always on safety.”
In the car, she says, there was no conversation about anyone being shot.
Nick Schaffer
Schaffer and a friend were in the area of the incident. He describes seeing a white man, a black woman and a thin black man with a bucket who appeared to be begging. Earlier in the evening, he says, the thin black man had asked his friend for a cigarette.
The three were heading north on Franklin when Schaffer saw them, according to the court transcript. He says he overheard the woman shout, “What the hell do you want? Get the hell away from me.” She also said, “You spilled something on me. What the hell is the matter with you?” Schaffer testifies.
The man, Schaffer says, told her, “I didn’t mean anything by it.” After that, the white man turned to Gould and said, “Get the f— away from us.” Then they started to cross the street to their car.
At this point, there is a conflict.
Schaffer testifies: “I saw the woman get into the car, and the gentleman stood towards the back of his car, and the homeless person was still there. . . . I saw the white gentleman grab the black gentleman by the neck. He said, `Didn’t I tell you to leave us alone?’
“Q. What did he do after that?
“A. After that, he swung his arm towards the head of the black man . . .
“Q. (When) the white man swung his hand at the black man, did you notice if there was anything in his right hand?
“A. Yes, it appeared there was a black object behind his hand . . .
“Q. What happened when the white man struck the black man with this black object?
“A. I heard a shot ring out.
“Q. What happened when the shot rang out?
“A. The black man fell to the ground, and the white man got in the car and left.”
Ramon Sandoval
He testifies that he was walking to a club to meet some friends when he saw the incident. He was walking south on Franklin on the west side of the street when he heard what he calls “a pop.”
He says he looked toward the sound and saw a bucket hit the ground “with the man holding the bucket.”
At this point, there is another conflict in the testimony. He says he saw two individuals standing over the black man, a white man and a black woman.
“Q. And what if anything did you see the white male do at the time?
“A. He escorted the black female around the back of the car to the passenger side of the car that was parked on the street.”
She got into the car, and then the white male walked around the car and got in on the driver’s side. The car backed up far enough to turn right on Huron Street, he testifies. He says he got a look at the license plate, ZUH 850. Later, he gave the number to the police.
After the car left, he says, he walked over. Gould’s body was twitching.
Ernest Edwards
Edwards testifies that he was driving south on Franklin when he saw a black male and black female arguing.
“I heard the woman screaming at the black male. It had something to do with water. `You are trying to throw water on me.’ Something to that effect,” Edwards testifies.
He didn’t hear what the black man said.
There was a white male nearby, he says. The white male stopped while the black man and woman caught up. The white male turned around and pushed the black man in the throat.
“Q. What happened? What did the black man do when the white man pushed him?
“A. He was kind of again, stunned, as though he wasn’t trying to do anything.”
He heard the shot just after he drove past the scene. He went around the block and saw the black male lying in the middle of the street in a puddle of blood, his white bucket beside him.
The rest of the testimony came from professional witnesses. Officer Smith, a police weapons specialist, tied Becker to the gun and the gun to the shooting.
There is an important question attached to the gun.
It was not retrieved at the scene and was in Becker’s possession between the time of the incident and 9:45 a.m. the same day, when Detective Flynn picked it up at Becker’s house. There were 13 rounds in the magazine and one spent cartridge in the chamber, unusual for a gun that automatically ejects shells after it is fired.
There are a few situations that can keep an automatic pistol from ejecting a spent casing. Thus far, the argument seems to be that during the struggle, somehow the slide on the top of the gun was blocked, which stopped the ejector from working properly.
No other line of questioning about what might keep that from happening was pursued.
The grim details of the actual death came from the medical examiner, who said it was clearly a close contact shooting because of the amount of debris inside the wound.
The medical examiner also testified under cross-examination that blood studies showed Gould’s blood had .07 percent alcohol content at the time of his death. The blood tested positive for cocaine and benzodiazepines, which are metabolites of cocaine. Because cocaine is rapidly metabolized, that means he had ingested some cocaine close to the time of the incident, although how much is anyone’s guess.
She could not say how his behavior would have been affected by the combination of alcohol and cocaine.
Bastone didn’t wait to hear arguments.
He said the record showed there was probable cause for two of the misconduct charges because Becker failed to report that he had fired his gun.
Because there was no testimony indicating that Becker knew he had shot Gould, the judge ruled there was no probable cause to believe that he had violated department rules by leaving a crime scene, by impeding department efforts or by failing to render medical assistance.
Because there were conflicts in the testimony of the state’s witnesses, the judge said, there was no probable cause on the involuntary-manslaughter charge.
The rulings caused a furor. U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush (D-Ill.) immediately petitioned the U.S. Department of Justice to demand an inquiry into whether Gould’s rights had been violated. Police Supt. Matt Rodriguez said he would pursue efforts to fire Becker, who was suspended without pay after the incident.
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It has bubbled and boiled since then, to the point that Cook County State’s Atty. Jack O’Malley pledged Friday that his office would pursue an investigation into the matter.
At this point, Becker, 35, faces two misconduct charges and an expanded investigation of exactly what happened under the “L” tracks at the end of July.
He has had trouble in the River North area before. On June 1, a Merrillville, Ind., man, Gerald A. Vasoli, filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court seeking $60,000 in damages against Becker after a car wreck.
Police reports say Vasoli was stopped in the north lanes of Franklin near Washington Street when his car was rear-ended on Jan. 14 by a car driven by Becker.
Kenneth Cunniff, Vasoli’s attorney, said his client believed that Becker had been drinking and asked at the scene and later at the hospital that Becker be given a breath test. Police at the scene said they didn’t think that was necessary, the lawyer said.
Whether this case will play any role in the Gould investigation remains to be seen. Although an important piece of the story died with Gould beneath the “L” in River North, O’Malley asked and answered his own question about the homeless man’s death: “Can we get to the truth? Well, we’re trying.”