Off-duty officer fired 11 shots that struck man
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By David Heinzmann
Chicago Tribune
CHICAGO — An off-duty Chicago police officer who fired the most shots of five cops involved in the 2005 death of Emmanuel Lopez was drinking before he became involved in a car chase that led to the fatal gunfire.
That acknowledgment came for the first time recently when the officer, Pedro Solis, was questioned under oath in a lawsuit stemming from the fatal shooting.
Just weeks ago, Cook County prosecutors closed their two-year probe into the shooting without taking any action. Sources familiar with that investigation said prosecutors were unaware that Solis had been drinking. Solis, the only off-duty officer among those involved, fired 11 of the 16 shots that struck Lopez.
The admission in the Nov. 6 deposition is one of several developments to emerge from the civil lawsuit after the state’s attorney’s office closed its investigation into whether forensic evidence supporting the police version of the September 2005 shooting had been fabricated.
Chicago police officials are looking into Solis’ admission about drinking, police spokeswoman Monique Bond said Monday. She declined to comment further, citing the pending lawsuit. The Independent Police Review Authority also continues to investigate the shooting.
Lopez, 23, who was driving to his overnight shift as a janitor in a sausage factory, was shot 16 times, mostly in the back and head. Police contended that he used his Honda Civic to partly run over one of the officers trying to stop him after a hit-and-run collision on the Southwest Side.
Questions in the case have always focused on two of the officers involved -- Brian Rovano, who police contend was pinned under Lopez’s car, and Solis, who initiated the pursuit of Lopez allegedly after seeing him driving erratically on Kedzie Avenue.
In his deposition, Solis said he had been working security at Los Comales restaurant in the 3000 block of West 63rd Street, according to a transcript of the deposition. When Terry Ekl, the Lopez family’s lawyer, asked whether he had consumed any alcohol during the course of the evening, Solis acknowledged that while armed and working, he drank two bottles of Corona at the restaurant.
Ekl followed up the question by asking whether police ever asked him during the shooting investigation if he had been drinking that night.
“I don’t recall,” Solis said. There is no mention of Solis drinking in detectives’ reports on the shooting.
Rovano’s deposition, taken Nov. 7, revealed another inconsistency with the original police version in how the shooting unfolded. Detectives wrote in a supplemental report weeks after the shooting that the officers opened fire on Lopez because Rovano was pinned under the front bumper of the car and was dragged about 10 feet.
But Rovano acknowledged under oath that he was not dragged by Lopez’s car and that the Honda moved a maximum of 4 or 5 feet after it bumped into Rovano.
Prosecutors launched their investigation after reviewing ballistics evidence that showed that the gun belonging to Rovano produced only one shot that struck Lopez. Rovano said he fired shots from his position pinned under the front of the car, but the wound in Lopez’s back came from a downward angle.
As has previously been reported, a retired FBI expert hired by the Lopez family wrote a report challenging the police contention that tire prints on Rovano’s pants were made by the wheel of Lopez’s car lurching onto his legs. The report alleged that the prints were made by someone hand-rolling an unmounted tire over a pair of empty pants laid flat.
When they closed their investigation, prosecutors ultimately concluded that Lopez was at fault and said they believed that the Cook County medical examiner’s office had explained the trajectory of the Rovano bullet as a ricochet. But the examiner’s report had suggested only that the bullet passed through another object before striking Lopez. And there was a corresponding hole in the driver’s seat that matched the bullet in his back, according to the lawsuit.
Copyright 2008 Chicago Tribune