Officer Raoul Mosqueda donned his dress uniform last week and joined Mayor Rahm Emanuel and top Chicago police officials at a graduation and promotion ceremony at Navy Pier.
Mosqueda, a 10-year department veteran, was celebrating his appointment to field training officer, a post that would position him to train rookie cops.
In a decision made public Thursday, however, police disciplinary authorities recommended he be fired for allegedly lying in court about his fatal shooting of Darius Pinex — a case that cost the city millions of dollars in a legal settlement and proved an embarrassment for Emanuel’s Law Department.
In its 34-page report, the Independent Police Review Authority pointed to serious discrepancies between a police dispatch recording and the accounts repeatedly given by Mosqueda about the events that led to the shooting. The city settled a lawsuit in December from Pinex’s family for about $3.5 million.
Mosqueda could not be immediately reached for comment.
Activists protest cop involved in fatal shooting preparing to train other police Dan Hinkel
Activists gathered outside a South Side police station Monday to voice outrage that a Chicago police officer involved in a controversial 2011 shooting is now in training to mentor rookie officers.
The Tribune revealed last week that departmental records show that Raoul Mosqueda is training to become…
Activists gathered outside a South Side police station Monday to voice outrage that a Chicago police officer involved in a controversial 2011 shooting is now in training to mentor rookie officers.
The Tribune revealed last week that departmental records show that Raoul Mosqueda is training to become…
(Dan Hinkel)
The case illustrates the persistence of the city’s problems with law enforcement and oversight more than a year after the release of a video of an officer shooting Laquan McDonald 16 times sparked outrage and promises of reform.
Mosqueda and his partner fired into a moving car at a man who had not displayed a weapon — the kind of questionable decision seen in numerous other shootings and a tactic sharply criticized in the recent report on the city’s police by the U.S. Department of Justice.
In addition, Mosqueda is only the latest of several Chicago police officers recently accused by disciplinary authorities of lying to cover up the facts of a problematic shooting.
The damage from Mosqueda’s statements spread beyond the Police Department during the court fight over the Pinex family’s lawsuit as a veteran city attorney resigned hours after a federal judge found he intentionally concealed the recordings from the family’s lawyers. A Tribune investigation last year detailed how the department has routinely failed to turn over potential evidence in police misconduct lawsuits.
Darius Pinex Family photo Darius Pinex was fatally shot by Chicago police in January 2011. Darius Pinex was fatally shot by Chicago police in January 2011. (Family photo)
Then, with IPRA days from closing the case, the Police Department appointed Mosqueda to field training officer — first revealed in a front-page Tribune story.
Now police Superintendent Eddie Johnson has 90 days to decide whether to seek to fire Mosqueda.
IPRA’s report does not call for his dismissal, but spokeswoman Mia Sissac confirmed that the agency has recommended his firing.
IPRA found there wasn’t enough credible evidence to conclusively determine whether the shooting itself violated policy. Any effort to fire him over the shooting would likely have faced a strong challenge because the famously sluggish IPRA took more than six years to investigate, going beyond the five-year statute of limitations to punish an officer for using excessive force.
An attorney for the Pinex family, Steve Greenberg, said in a written statement that he hoped the recommendation would have "a chilling effect on the serial lying that is all too common" among police.
Timeline: Chicago police controversies during Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administrationRead the story
Asked about Mosqueda’s appointment as a field training officer, department spokesman Anthony Guglielmi has said top police officials have little control over who becomes a trainer, citing limitations imposed by the police union contract.
In the incident in January 2011, Mosqueda and his partner, Gildardo Sierra, boxed in the car driven by Pinex, exiting with guns drawn. The officers alleged Pinex, who had a history of drug arrests, refused orders and threw the vehicle in reverse, hitting a light pole and then gunning the car forward. Mosqueda fatally shot Pinex in the head, though Sierra also opened fire, records show. Investigators found a gun beneath the driver’s seat, police reports showed.
Mosqueda later reported that they stopped the car because they heard a police dispatch saying it was involved in an earlier shooting. At the trial over the Pinex family’s lawsuit, however, a recording emerged that contradicted Mosqueda’s testimony. The officer had claimed the dispatch had matched Pinex’s vehicle, but the recording didn’t match the specifics of his Oldsmobile Aurora and didn’t mention any shooting, raising doubts about the lawfulness of the traffic stop.
Gloria Pinex’s son was killed 6 years ago by Chicago police
Gloria Pinex talks about the death of her son Darius Pinex, who was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer in 2011. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)
Gloria Pinex talks about the death of her son Darius Pinex, who was shot and killed by a Chicago police officer in 2011. (Zbigniew Bzdak / Chicago Tribune)
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In its report, IPRA concluded that Mosqueda lied on three occasions — during his initial statement to IPRA investigators, at a deposition for the lawsuit and then on the stand at trial. Even after the trial, Mosqueda stood by his version while giving another statement to IPRA investigators in September, the report said.
In addition to finding that Mosqueda lied, IPRA held that the recordings cast doubts on the probable cause for the traffic stop and ruled that it was legally unjustified.
Meanwhile, the shooting marked the third involving Sierra — two of them fatal — in less than six months in 2011. Last year, IPRA ruled the other fatal shooting unjustified, though the decision had little practical effect, because Sierra resigned in 2015.
Mosqueda’s case is not the first in which IPRA took so long to make a decision that it lost the opportunity to recommend discipline for an unwarranted use of force. The agency last year allowed the statute of limitations to expire in an excessive force allegation against Lt. Glenn Evans, who has been the subject of dozens of citizen complaints.
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The problems start at the training academy, where Chicago police recruits are shown a decades-old video teaching them outdated tactics on when and how to use deadly force.
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(Jason Meisner and Annie Sweeney)
The IPRA investigation into Mosqueda was nearing the five-year mark in December 2015 when Emanuel fired the agency’s chief administrator, Scott Ando, and replaced him with Sharon Fairley in the fallout from the video showing Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting McDonald 16 times as the teen walked away from police.
Emanuel’s administration is in the process of replacing IPRA with the Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which is intended to have more funding and wider authority and will also be run by Fairley at its start.
In nearly a decade of investigating hundreds of police shootings, IPRA has ruled that six shootings — three of them fatal — violated policy. Four of those rulings have come in the 14 months since Fairley was appointed.
dhinkel@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @dhinkel
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