The fatal police shooting of 13-year-old Adam Toledo on March 29 in the Little Village neighborhood was one of the biggest and most controversial crime-related local news stories in many months, and Cook County State’s Attorney Kim Foxx was not on top of it.
On April 10, Foxx left it to trusted prosecutors beneath her in the chain of command to offer at a court hearing a summary of the evidence against Ruben Roman, the 21-year-old man who was with Toledo that night. Roman is charged with child endangerment, reckless discharge of a firearm, unlawful use of a weapon and a probation violation.
But because “the checks and balances that should have been in place for someone to be able to review” that summary “didn’t work,” as Foxx put it in an interview with the Tribune, prosecutor James Murphy gave a misleading summary of the moment a police officer fired the fatal shot. Specifically, Murphy made it sound as though Toledo had been holding a gun the moment the officer fired, when, in fact, Toledo had apparently discarded his gun a fraction of a second earlier.
It was a legally irrelevant detail, since Roman was not directly involved in the shooting. And obviously a blunder, since the Civilian Office of Police Accountability was poised to release bodycam and other videos of the event, which it did April 15. But public impressions are important, moment to moment, when a community is in turmoil, and misleading narratives erode public trust.
Foxx suspended Murphy for two weeks. Then, after an internal investigation revealed that communication breakdowns had caused him not to be accurately informed, she reinstated him and appeared to place the blame on her second-in-command, Jennifer Coleman, a 26-year veteran of the office, who resigned Wednesday. Coleman had been in a position to know the facts of the case and to review Murphy’s proffer for accuracy.
But you know who else was in a position to know the facts and to review Murphy’s proffer for accuracy?
Kim Foxx.
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Columns are opinion content that reflect the views of the writers.
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Nobody expects the county’s top prosecutor to micromanage every hearing and every motion in every case, even the big cases. But when the city is on edge, when there are protests in the streets demanding answers and when every word matters, she needs to take charge and be accountable.
Those “checks and balances”? She oversees them. She’s responsible for making sure they’re in place. So she’s responsible for Murphy’s “inartful” language, as her office put it. She must fully own it and move on.
The way Foxx has blamed, punished and effectively fired underlings to distract from her failure is infamous.
Twitter @EricZorn
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