By Rummana Hussain
Chicago Sun-Times
Accused cop killer Shawn Gaston admitted he pulled the trigger the morning Alejandro “Alex” Valadez was shot, a top Cook County prosecutor testified Tuesday.
Assistant State’s Attorney Fabio Valentini said he never informed the South Side man a Chicago Police officer was hit in the June 1, 2009, shooting.
But Valentini said Gaston casually told him he shot four rounds in the direction where the plainclothes Englewood District officer had been standing in the 6000 block of South Hermitage.
Valadez, 27, died hours after the bullets pierced his thigh and left ear.
“I did the shooting,” Gaston said matter-of-factly in a 15-minute videotaped statement that Assistant State’s Attorney Jeffrey Allen presented to the jury hearing the case against Gaston in Judge Jorge Alonso’s courtroom.
Gaston said he and his best friend, Kevin Walker, had just finished getting matching tattoos from a “big fat white dude” when the gray Pontiac G6 they were in was shot at 10 times.
Gaston retrieved a 9mm weapon he had hidden in a neighbor’s back porch and told Walker they were “fitting to go right back” and avenge the attack, Gaston said on videotape.
He then directed Walker to drive back to the South Hermitage address. “I told him [Walker] to slow down. I’d seen people standing right there, and I shot them,” Gaston, 22, said on camera.
“Right there,” according to prosecutors, was where Valadez had been talking to Englewood resident Kelvin Thomas while following up on the shots fired just five minutes earlier that had irked Gaston.
Gaston said he and some “n - - - - - -" on Hermitage had been fighting for a while, but he told Valentini and a detective that it wasn’t a gang-related dispute.
Gaston had confessed hours before he agreed to be videotaped and used his right hand to make a shooting motion, said Valentini, chief of the State’s Attorney’s Office Criminal Bureau.
Gaston, who was wearing a gray argyle sweater vest Tuesday, occasionally rocked in his chair and placed his hand on his face while Valentini recounted how he, Gaston and Area 1 detectives drove to the scene of the crime.
The foam boxes of nachos Thomas had been holding when the shots sprayed out remained on the cold pavement where Valadez was shot, Valentini recalled.
After he fired the bullets, Gaston told Valentini, he put the 9mm back in its hiding place and went to a party across the street from his house in the 6200 block of South Paulina. He had just finished drinking a cup of Patron tequila when the officers arrived and took him into custody, Gaston said.
At the end of the videotaped confession, Gaston is heard telling Valentini and a detective that he needed to use the washroom. “I gotta piss like a race horse,” Gaston said.
The 9mm that Gaston said he had stored in a back porch was never recovered, but three weapons turned up in Gaston’s mother’s car, said prosecutors, who rested their case late Tuesday.
Defense attorney John Paul Carroll began calling mostly Englewood District police officers to the stand in an apparent attempt to show that police did not follow proper procedures.
Walker and another man, Christopher Harris, are awaiting trial in Valadez’s murder.
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