Adam Toledo

On 29 March 2021, 13-year-old Adam Toledo was gunned down by police officer Eric Stillman in Little Village, a Latino neighborhood in Chicago. Toledo was remembered by family as a “kind” and “funny” kid.“ One teacher described the seventh grader as “really passionate about art. He really liked to draw a lot. That was like his gift.”

For over two weeks police and prosecutors asserted that Toledo was armed and claimed the cop shot the teen in self-defense. The police incident report described Stillman as a victim in an aggravated assault of a law enforcement officer. One law enforcement expert described this as a “long-used and hackneyed trope” to recast the “focus of culpability” onto “the person who the police killed.” But an area resident who said she witnessed the shooting from her apartment window across the street said that Toledo was complying with the officer’s requests when he was shot.

Toledo’s killing spurred protests in Chicago, where thousands took to the streets, and cities across the country where it was linked to the cop killing of 20-year-old Daunte Wright in Minnesota two weeks later. In response to the outpouring of rage, body-cam footage was released weeks later, ripping apart the state’s lies. The video showed Toledo running away and dropping a handgun before he turned towards Stillman.  As Toledo raised his empty hands and turned Stillman fired, hitting Toledo in the chest. He died on the scene.

On April 10 2021, Cook County assistant prosecutor James Murphy falsely stated in court that Toledo was holding a gun at the time he was shot. Following release of the body-cam footage, Murphy was briefly placed on administrative leave. In 2024 he was elected to a judgeship on the Cook County Circuit Court. Chicago has long been a Democratic Party stronghold.

Adam Toledo is long remembered in a city where cop terror against blacks and Latinos is rampant. Two days after Toledo’s killing a cop shot and killed 20-year-old Anthony Alvarez as he fled from an unwarranted stop. Latinos are killed by police at a rate six times higher than white people, the second highest rate after black people. At the time of the shooting, the CPD was operating under a court-ordered consent decree entered with the Department of Justice which required the city to implement hundreds of reforms to its policing practices. Fat good it did. In 2022, the State’s Attorney Kim Foxx announced no charges would by brought against Toledo’s or Alvarez’s killers. Biden’s DOJ refused to investigate. The family of Adam Toledo recently filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Chicago in federal court.

The cops’ lies about the killing of Adam Toledo were only exposed by the release of the video tape. This case shows why all police archives in these cases of police brutality must be exposed to the public as an elementary act of self defense for the black and Latino communities. All the files on this case and on the cops involved should be exposed to public scrutiny. Open the police archives!