By Angela Rozas
Chicago Tribune
Copyright 2007 Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — Gefrey Johnson’s family said he could be trouble sometimes, that he had a temper and a “crazy way” of acting out.
Johnson, 42, who lived in the Gresham neighborhood, had a drug problem and almost two dozen arrests, and at one point his family got an order of protection against him, relatives and police said.
But his mother, Lula, 74, loved her youngest son and took him in once again last week after he was released from jail after serving three months for missing court related to a drug charge, she said.
But on Saturday, suspecting Johnson was using drugs again, family members called police about 1:30 p.m. and asked them to remove him from their house in the 8100 block of South Green Street. When he resisted, police shot him with a Taser, and he was pronounced dead later in St. Bernard Hospital.
On Sunday, the Cook County medical examiner’s office said more studies were needed to determine the cause of death, a process that usually takes weeks.
Johnson’s family protested the department’s use of the Taser, saying it was excessive and the officers should be held accountable for his death.
Chicago police said they were awaiting the full autopsy but believe that officers acted properly in trying to subdue Johnson.
“Police were following the proper protocol,” said Monique Bond, spokeswoman for the department. “They were even probably going beyond to accommodate the subject as far as his personal needs.”
Bond said other factors may have contributed to Johnson’s death.
“We don’t know what kind of pre-existing conditions may have precipitated his behavior,” she said.
On Sunday, Johnson’s family offered the following account of what happened in the house:
On Saturday afternoon, Johnson’s older sister, Linda Johnson-Moore, found him rooting around in a plastic plant in the living room, a past hiding place for his narcotics. His sister told him to leave the plant alone, but he grabbed it instead and locked himself in his bedroom.
Johnson-Moore said she and her mother banged on the door. She urged her mother to call police.
But her mother couldn’t bear making the call, so Johnson-Moore did. Police officers arrived and, with the family’s permission, broke through the door, where they found Johnson and a woman in the bedroom.
Johnson was naked and refused to leave. Johnson-Moore said she heard some shoving, and one officer, who knew Johnson and his drug problems well, asked Johnson why he had pushed him down.
Johnson asked to go to the bathroom, and the officers allowed him. Johnson-Moore said she could hear the officers talking to her brother in the bathroom, trying to calm him down.
An officer asked Johnson-Moore if police should take him to a hospital for help, and she agreed. Everybody seemed calm, and the officers told him they weren’t arresting him; they just wanted him to “go for a walk,” Johnson-Moore said.
But at some point, the mood changed. Though police deny it, Johnson-Moore said a sergeant told Johnson they didn’t have time to wait any longer. Johnson told the officers he couldn’t use the bathroom while they were watching him. Johnson-Moore said she thinks her brother tried to close the bathroom door, and the next sound she heard was the door being slammed up against the wall, the mirror on the back of it crashing to the floor.
According to Johnson-Moore, the sergeant shot a Taser at Johnson, and she heard an officer tell her brother, “Don’t pull it off! Don’t pull it off!” Johnson-Moore said her brother was not combative, but that police hit him twice more with the Taser before dragging him out of the bathroom in handcuffs. He wasn’t conscious and died on the floor, family members said.
But police disagree with that version. They said Johnson was combative, so they shot him with a Taser once. He tried to take the prongs off and came at them, police said, so the officer shot the Taser again. They said the Taser cartridge can be fired only twice, so they used pepper spray as well to subdue him.
Police said Johnson remained aggressive and was taken to the hospital in a squad car because paramedics thought he was too combative. Police said he died in the hospital.
Family members said they don’t think the police officers meant to kill Johnson but are still responsible.
“I kept begging them to stop. I said, ‘You’re hurting him,’” Johnson-Moore said Sunday, as she held out discarded wires from a Taser she found in the bathroom.
She said the officers told them that they were using the Taser for his own protection.
Regardless of their intent, Johnson-Moore said the officers shouldn’t have used the Taser more than once. “I think that was such excessive force,” she said.
Chicago police have been using Tasers since 2002, hailing them as a non-lethal alternative useful in subduing aggressive people. But the department halted buying new ones in 2005 after authorities said a Taser was one factor in a man’s death but cited methamphetamine as another.
After a review, police deemed the Tasers safe and this summer distributed 150 of the guns already in stock to field training officers, adding to the 200 already used by sergeants. The department has not, however, placed any new orders for Tasers.