Police: We Had Nothing To Do With Missing Footage In Laquan McDonald Case
On the night of the shooting, a handful of officers came to the restaurant and asked to view the recordings, Darshane said. Employees gave them the password to the equipment, and three hours later, the officers left, he said.
When an investigator for Chicago's Independent Police Review Authority showed up the next day asking for the same thing, the IPRA investigator found that nearly an hour and a half of footage recorded around the time of McDonald's death had gone missing. Darshane said the police must have been to blame.
"We had no idea they were going to sit there and delete files," Darshane told NBC Chicago. "I mean, we were just trying to help the police officers."
In an
interview with MSNBC in May, Michael Robbins, an attorney for the McDonald family, said the gap in the footage was troubling.
"The fact that the police entered the Burger King restaurant without a warrant or a subpoena, accessed the system upon demanding the password, and then left and that 86 minutes or so of video is missing from all 11 cameras is something that gave us a great deal of concern," Robbins said.
"Now, the video would not have shown the actual shooting, but it would have shown the events leading up to the shooting and perhaps some of the witnesses during the course of the shooting and the police interaction with the witnesses following the shooting," he added. "There is no credible explanation for why this video is missing."
