A Chicago police officer involved in the fatal shooting of a driver earlier this month was relieved of his police powers Friday, Police Department representatives confirmed.
Officer Max Walzer, who was stationed in the Harrison (11th) District on the West Side, is the subject of a Civilian Office of Police Accountability investigation stemming from the March 9 shooting and crash at 812 N. Homan Ave, public records show. He is currently detailed to the alternate response section, a typical landing place for officers awaiting disciplinary action.
Chicago Police Department representatives didn’t comment on whether he had been relieved of police powers as a result of the shooting, which took place four days earlier, and noted that COPA’s investigation remains open. Walzer couldn’t immediately be reached for a comment by phone or email.
Shortly after the shooting took place in Humboldt Park, CPD said in a statement that a group of officers were trying to do an investigatory stop on a vehicle thought to be connected to an earlier shooting when the car’s driver tried to flee. The car hit a woman walking, a CTA bus and an unmarked squad car, police said, and one of the officers fired as the group tried to arrest the driver. Police later recovered a gun from the car, according to the department’s statement.
Video footage that purports to capture the shooting was posted to social media within hours, showing a plainclothes officer apparently trying to break the windows of a white coupe as the car tries to maneuver between another parked car and a stalled CTA bus. Other officers run up to surround the vehicle as it reverses and strikes the bus again, then crashing into several vehicles and the bus once more before one officer fires six shots in rapid succession.
The intersection was clogged with vehicle and foot traffic at the time of the shooting, and immediately after the shots were fired a man nearby can be heard yelling, “Hey, man, you didn’t have to do that!”
A few seconds later, one of the officers on the scene was heard replying, “He’s wanted for murder.”
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Information on the possible earlier shooting linked to the vehicle was not immediately made available by police.
The video does not show the interior of the car or the driver, later identified by the Cook County medical examiner as 42-year-old Derek Jordan. An autopsy found Jordan’s death was a homicide due to multiple gunshot wounds.
Jordan’s criminal history includes prior drug convictions, records show, as well as a dropped domestic assault case.
Public records show Walzer has been a police officer since February 2022. Data from the Office of Inspector General shows he has been the subject of four misconduct complaints in that period, none of which were sustained by COPA.