Julie Bosman and Monica Davey

First came flooded farm fields and roads across Nebraska and Iowa. Then the Mississippi River rose and rose, threatening towns along its banks. And Wednesday night, a series of violent tornadoes tore through the region, ripping apart buildings and darkening whole neighborhoods.

Even then, another threat was looming. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, and surrounding suburbs it was a tense evening Thursday as water levels steadily rose and officials braced for some of the worst flooding in decades along the Arkansas River after the Army Corps of Engineers increased the flow of releases from Keystone Dam.

And officials were warning of swollen waters along the Mississippi, the Missouri and the Illinois Rivers.

All of it was bringing a new level of exhaustion to a region that has found itself fighting multiple crises through a wet and battering spring.

“All we could think was, ‘Flooding, flooding, flooding,’” said Jessica Brown, who lives in Jefferson City, Missouri’s capital, where a wide, dense tornado barreled through on Wednesday, a day when officials had been preparing for flooding from the nearby Missouri River. “Then the sirens go, and it’s ‘Get to your basement,’” she said.

Brown, a state employee, grabbed her 12-year-old daughter, Angaleah, and fled downstairs, barely escaping the shards of glass that flew through her living room after the windows exploded.

“The whole neighborhood’s destroyed,” Brown said, standing not far from her front porch — the only one that was left on her house by Thursday.

The National Weather Service was investigating 34 reports of tornadoes in Oklahoma and Missouri on Wednesday as storms moved northeast from Texas along a virtually straight diagonal line into western Illinois. Three people, including a couple in their 80s, were killed in a tornado that struck rural southwestern Missouri, which has been drenched with several bouts of heavy rain and flash flooding in recent weeks. The storms sent debris nearly 14,000 feet into the air in at least one location, radar images showed — a defining feature of a particularly damaging and dangerous tornado.

Kenneth G. Harris, 86, and his wife, Opal P. Harris, 83, were found about 200 yards from their home near Golden City, Missouri. Their home was demolished, and the authorities said they were uncertain whether the couple had been inside when the storm hit or had tried to flee.

Betty Berg, 56, was also killed. Her mobile home had rolled over, state officials said. Berg’s husband, Mark, was hospitalized with injuries.

The storms’ worst damage occurred in Missouri, near Golden City and Jefferson City. In Jefferson City, wind speeds were estimated to have reached as high as 160 mph. Golden City is not far from Joplin, where one of the deadliest and most destructive tornadoes in U.S. history hit. The storms Wednesday occurred on the eighth anniversary of that tornado, which killed 161 people.

About 25 people were injured in Jefferson City, a community of 40,000 people where rescue workers Thursday searched house by house for survivors near felled oak trees, overturned cars and power lines strewn across driveways. The size of the devastation was yet to be fully understood, but it was extensive; roughly 3 square miles of the city were particularly hard hit. Shelters were opened. A curfew order was issued for part of the city.

Some residents speculated that the timing of the storm may have helped prevent deaths. In Jefferson City, tornado sirens had gone off after 11 p.m., before the storm hit, and by that hour, many people were already at home for the night. Many were in bed.

Jay Banwell, a retired officer with the Army National Guard, said he had woken as wind was whipping at his bedroom window. Then the wind burst through his window pane, slamming his bedroom door shut with such force that he was trapped inside.

“I was basically in a room of swirling glass,” said Banwell, 56, who was taken by ambulance Thursday to be treated for a laceration.

Loise White, 89, was in bed when she heard the screeching sound. Then the glass blew out of her bedroom window.

Her TV toppled off its stand, clothes swirled around her and the wind pelted her with her own books. “It was throwing each one of those books at me just as hard as it could, whamming me,” White said.

“It was just a really mean wind,” she said. “And rough.”

In the end, her car was crushed by a tree. The upper half of her home was gone. “It’s like you just took a knife and sliced off her second story,” her son, Greg White, said.

As residents across the region began sorting through the rubble, meteorologists were warning of more dangerous conditions ahead. In addition to heavy rain and flood risks, the possibility of tornadoes was expected to last into early next week, as warm air masses from the southeast collide with a cool air mass from the northwest. Tornado-prone storms often form along such intersections, feeding off the variation in the wind direction.

“Everything here is already saturated,” said Chris Franks, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Kansas City, Missouri. “We can’t take a lot more rainfall, and the forecast calls for a lot more rain early into next week.”

On Wednesday, Carrie Tergin, the mayor of Jefferson City, canceled an air show honoring veterans planned for Memorial Day weekend because the regional airport was forecast to be under 6 feet of water — the result of Missouri River floods that the city has been bracing for all spring.

On Thursday, Tergin canceled a state track meet at the public high school because the tornado had blown the roof off the press box at the stadium.

“With all that’s been going on with this tornado, I haven’t even checked on the flood,” Tergin said late Thursday afternoon. “We just keep canceling things.”

The tornadoes came in a period of extreme weather, which has been linked to climate change.

One analysis of extreme weather data found that human-caused climate change was a “significant driver” of 21 out of 27 extreme weather events, including droughts, floods and heat waves. But limited historical information, especially when compared with temperature data that goes back more than a century, makes it hard for researchers to determine whether the number of tornadoes is increasing, or if it is just a matter of better reporting.

A 2016 study in the journal Science found that tornado outbreaks, or several tornadoes forming in the same weather system, were becoming more frequent. But despite the recent string this spring, including one in eastern Alabama in March that killed 23 people, this year’s tornado season has been within historical averages, according to Patrick Marsh, a warning coordination meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center.

In Jefferson City on Thursday afternoon, cars were turned upside down and tossed around at a cluster of car dealerships. The historic state penitentiary, about a mile from the state Capitol, was damaged. And in one hilly neighborhood, streets were covered in shattered glass, splinters of wood, a powder-blue mattress, a fork.

For days before the tornado, Trevor Grant, a 54-year-old hospital aide, had worried about the threat from the Missouri River, just blocks from his pale yellow house. What might it do to the place?

“I don’t know what could be next for us,” Grant said Thursday, looking down his street, covered with gutters, roof shingles and chunks of insulation.

This article originally appeared in <a id="ff2521d9-8738-3c36-aa0f-92ae43607d23" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/us/missouri-oklahoma-tornado.html">The New York Times</a>.

In the Midwest, heavy rains, devastating floods and 'Then the Sirens Go'

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — It has been a relentless storm season in the Midwest.

<h1>CHICAGO — A merciless cold crippled the Midwest on Wednesday, halting planes and trains, shuttering schools and prompting officials in Detroit, Minneapolis and Chicago to open emergency warming centers for the homeless and vulnerable.</h1>

The bitter weather was believed to be tied to the deaths of at least eight people, including a man thought to have collapsed after shoveling snow and frozen to death in his Milwaukee garage. Hospitals saw a steady stream of patients reporting symptoms of frostbite.

Temperatures in Minneapolis dipped as low as 28 degrees below zero, with the wind chill reaching 53 degrees below zero, the National Weather Service said. Fargo, North Dakota, reached minus 33; Milwaukee, minus 20. The Midwest was expected to see miserable temperatures through Thursday, and the cold air was moving east.

Across the Midwest on Wednesday, residents who are used to carrying on with life’s routines despite bad weather had little choice but to shiver, stay indoors and make the best of it, even as the insides of their windows became ominously lined with ice.

Even the U.S. Postal Service — despite its unofficial vow that couriers cannot be stopped by “snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night” — was forced to suspend deliveries in some particularly frigid places.

Health officials, urging people to go outside only if necessary, warned that exposing skin to the air could lead to frostbite. They were not exaggerating: Going gloveless for only a minute or two, in double-digit negative temperatures, left hands feeling numb, then clumsy and flipper-like, then white-hot with pain.

The most intense cold was expected overnight Wednesday into Thursday, said Ben Deubelbeiss, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

After sunset Wednesday, temperatures were to drop again, sinking so low that the record for Chicago — 27 degrees below zero — could be reached.

Some forms of transportation were snarled by the miserable cold. More than 2,500 flights were canceled across the United States, according to FlightAware.

And Amtrak, which ordinarily runs 55 trains to or from Chicago each day, said it had canceled all of its Wednesday services involving the city and that most Thursday trains would also be scratched. Given Chicago’s prominence in the Amtrak network, the decision was expected to be felt across the country.

This article originally appeared in <a id="29e02fa7-e084-4cf3-8be9-fe6a5c5248f0" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/us/weather-polar-vortex-cold.html">The New York Times</a>.

The bitter weather was believed to be tied to the deaths of at least eight people, including a man thought to have collapsed after shoveling snow and frozen to death in his Milwaukee garage.

Relentless cold slows Midwest to shivering crawl

Temperatures in Minneapolis dipped as low as 28 degrees below zero, with the wind chill reaching 53 degrees below zero, the National Weather Service said. Fargo, North Dakota, reached minus 33; Milwaukee, minus 20. The worst of the cold was feared overnight into Thursday, when meteorologists predicted that temperatures could dip to 27 degrees below zero in Chicago, a record for the city. The Midwest was expected to see miserable temperatures through Thursday, and the cold air was moving east.

Across the Midwest on Wednesday, residents who are used to carrying on with life’s routines despite bad weather had little choice but to shiver, stay indoors and make the best of it, even as the insides of their windows became ominously lined with ice. Office workers were stuck at home. Parents scrambled for last-minute child care. In Michigan, a gas company asked customers to use less natural gas to heat their houses after a fire at a compressor station.

Visits with prisoners in the Stearns County, Minnesota, jail were canceled. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, garbage and recycling collection was delayed. In Wisconsin, the unthinkable: Beer distributors grounded their trucks, fearing that their product would freeze.

In Chicago, what would normally be a bustling day slowed to a frigid crawl.

Travel on Lake Shore Drive, normally choked with morning traffic, was leisurely. Buses continued on their routes and “L” trains rumbled through the city, but most cars looked nearly empty. A few stray bicyclists in ski goggles and snow pants could still be seen pedaling painfully down the streets, refusing to bow to the cold.

Restaurants, museums and shops seemed to have one thing in common: a hastily placed sign on the door announcing that they were closed for the day.

There would be no chance of a scoop of dulce de leche at Frio Gelato on Clark Street (not that anyone would want it). Even “Disney on Ice,” which was scheduled to run Wednesday night at Chicago’s United Center, was canceled.

At Huck Finn, a diner on the Southwest Side, there were fewer patrons than usual. But the customers who did come in were cheerful, almost exuberant.

“It’s like they’re living through some kind of weather history — everyone else stayed in, and we’re here doing our thing,” the general manager, Demetri Hiotis, said. “There’s a sense of pride. It’s 22 below, but I still went to work, got my breakfast, got my coffee and doughnut.”

Commerce slowed throughout the Midwest, but the frigid conditions were unlikely to exact a lingering economic toll. In a 2015 report, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago concluded that winter weather had “a significant but short-lived effect on economic activity.” But economists, the report suggested, have struggled to pinpoint the financial consequences of events like this week’s polar vortex, especially because regional and national economies are shaped by many factors.

Perhaps the most distressing news was that it wasn’t over. The most intense cold was expected overnight Wednesday into Thursday, said Ben Deubelbeiss, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.

After sunset Wednesday, temperatures were to drop again, sinking so low that the record for Chicago — 27 degrees below zero — could be reached. “We were only a few degrees away from that today, and we might achieve it tonight,” Deubelbeiss said.

By Friday, the temperature should be in the 20s, still below normal for this time of year in Chicago but no longer the bone-chilling cold of midweek.

The extremely low temperatures this week in parts of the United States stand in sharp contrast to the trend toward warmer winters. But they may also be a result of warming.

Emerging research suggested that a warming Arctic was causing changes in the jet stream and pushing polar air down — hence this week’s atypical chill over large swaths of the Northeast and Midwest.

Friederike Otto, an Oxford University climate scientist who studies how specific weather events are exacerbated by global warming, said that while not all of these extreme events could be attributed to climate change, the profound changes in the Earth’s atmosphere raised “the likelihood of a large number of extreme events.”

Throughout the Midwest, hospitals reported patients arriving with symptoms tied to the weather. The Illinois Department of Public Health said at least 30 people statewide had been to emergency rooms for frostbite or hypothermia-related visits by Wednesday morning.

At Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, the emergency department reported “many patients” who were injured or ill because of the weather. Frostbite cases alone led to at least 13 admissions.

“It’s busier than it would normally be,” Dr. Douglas Brunette, an emergency room doctor in Minneapolis, said Wednesday afternoon. “But it’s not a mass casualty incident yet.”

And Amtrak, which ordinarily runs 55 trains to or from Chicago each day, said that it had canceled all of its Wednesday services involving the city and that most Thursday trains would also be scratched. Given Chicago’s prominence in the Amtrak network, the decision was expected to be felt across the country.

In the region’s biggest cities, many public transit systems tried to press on. The Chicago Transit Authority said that its “L” trains had operated with some delays for a short time — and that workers had repaired one cracked rail — but that service was back to normal by afternoon.

Metra, a commuter railroad in the Chicago region that had already announced modified schedules, said it had suspended electric train service indefinitely because of wire problems “caused by harsh subfreezing temperatures.”

Transit agencies in Detroit, Milwaukee and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul were trying to operate normally, but some warned customers of the potential for delays.

Schools across a broad section of the nation canceled classes as the dangerous freeze descended, and some said they were pondering canceling classes again Thursday. Many Midwestern institutions lean toward staying open through snowstorms and cold spells, but this one was different. For a second consecutive day, students Wednesday were told to stay home at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, where there was a forecast high of 3 degrees below zero, relatively warm compared with other parts of the Midwest.

Hundreds of thousands of younger students in schools across the country’s midsection also had no classes. Administrators in school districts in and around Cincinnati, worried about students walking to school or the possibility of a bus breaking down in the cold, called off class. In parts of the region, the deep freeze meant several days without school, which quickly opened debates over how the missed days would be made up and whether summer vacation — seemingly so far-off now — might have to wait even longer.

The cold snap had some other, more bewildering consequences. Residents across the Midwest reported hearing mysterious crashing sounds, likely the result of a weather phenomenon known as a “frost quake.” During a sudden deep freeze, water in the soil can turn to ice and rapidly expand, causing sudden cracks in the ground and a loud boom. They usually strike during the coldest part of the night.

The deep cold brought other unfamiliar sounds too: odd, sudden creaks and groans of porches and even buildings. Moans from frigid car engines. Whirring, drumming whines of wind against windows and walls.

On Wednesday morning, a few Chicago residents embraced the bone-chilling temperatures. At Montrose Harbor on Chicago’s North Side, Iggy Ignoffo stood at the edge of Lake Michigan, wearing sunglasses and a warm cap, hands stuffed in his pockets.

“I could see Venus, Jupiter and the moon a little while ago,” he said, pointing to the sky. “Beautiful.” Sea smoke rose from the lake, the result of extremely cold air blowing over warmer water.

The harbor was hardly deserted: A stream of curious people ducked in and out of their cars, snapping pictures, taking a brief frolic in the snow.

Ignoffo and his wife come down to the harbor all the time, he said, one of the most photogenic spots in the city.

This article originally appeared in <a id="06e61645-e8e6-484d-9d08-aefe0db3eca5" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/30/us/weather-polar-vortex-cold.html">The New York Times</a>.

A merciless cold lingers in the Midwest

<h1>CHICAGO — As temperatures in Midwestern cities plunged to levels colder than parts of Antarctica and officials warned people not to step outside even for a few minutes, Tony Neeley stood on a downtown Chicago street corner Tuesday, wearing wet sneakers and clutching a hand warmer packet in each of his bare hands. He had already been there for hours.</h1>

“I’m cold and I’m afraid,” Neeley said, adding that he was trying to raise enough money from the bundled commuters rushing past to pay for a $45 motel room on a night that weather forecasters warned would send the Midwest into a deep freeze unlike anything even this region has seen in years.

What about the prospect of going to one of the scores of shelters officials in Chicago — and in cities like Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Detroit — had urged homeless people to seek warmth in during the stretch of dangerous and extreme cold?

“You don’t understand,” Neeley said. “A lot of us don’t go to the shelters because of bedbugs; we don’t go because people steal from you; we don’t go because you can’t even really sleep in the shelter. But my feet are cold, and these clothes are all I’ve got.”

As the polar vortex dumped a vicious mass of arctic weather on the middle of the nation, states like Michigan and Wisconsin declared emergencies, schools and university classes were canceled, museums were closed, and many workers were told to stay home. But as health officials issued numerous warnings about the dangers of frostbite and hypothermia, homeless people faced potentially devastating circumstances.

The severity of the threat was expected to be at its worst Wednesday, a day that forecasters said could deliver actual temperatures in the minus double digits and windchill readings as low as 50 or 60 degrees below zero. Wind aside, the high temperature in Chicago was expected to be 15 degrees below zero, the low 26 degrees below zero, according to predictions Tuesday evening.

Cold winter temperatures are nothing new for those without homes in the Midwest, and big cities have always had plans to assist the homeless. But several Midwestern cities, including Akron, Ohio, and Kalamazoo, Michigan, have had painful reckonings with homeless encampments over the past year. And the searing, face-burning winds that arrived this week, and the numbing, record-breaking temperatures that were soon expected, brought a level of risk for the homeless that has rarely been seen.

As residents bustled around Chicago on Tuesday, many of them shopping for last-minute goods before settling in at home for the worst of the weather, several areas where homeless people congregate had emptied, too.

Still, a campsite could be seen on Chicago’s Lower Wacker Drive, a road beneath the city’s downtown offices, where someone was sleeping beneath a pile of blankets and beside a pair of shoes. Wearing a sign around his neck that asked for help, a 60-year-old man sat inside the entryway of a drugstore on State Street. He said he had slept outside the night before, and was still unable to warm up hours later. He had no plan yet for the night ahead, he said.

The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless estimates that about 80,000 people are homeless in the Chicago area. Estimates vary widely about the homeless population throughout the Midwest.

In Detroit, officials said they were racing to reach out to homeless people and offer places to get warm and transportation. In Cleveland, city and county officials said they were working with shelters and nonprofits to find places for the homeless to stay safely. And in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, leaders said they were keeping shelters open during the daytime, and stores were donating snacks and lunches.

In Milwaukee, where there are about 900 homeless people either in shelters or living on the streets, warming centers have been opened and outreach workers are fanning out around the city, trying to persuade people to come indoors.

“We’re always concerned, but especially when you can get frostbite in about eight minutes,” said Wendy Weckler, executive director of Hope House, a shelter for families, who has helped coordinate the preparation. “The outreach workers are out looking for people, and trying to find the people who don’t usually come in and getting them somewhere safe.”

Chicago officials said scores of warming shelters were open, extra beds had been prepared, and teams of workers had been out overnight all week urging homeless people to take shelter. Libraries, police stations and community centers were being used as warming centers, and city officials were seeking help from ministers to consider opening more spots.

“No one in need of a safe or warm place to stay will be turned away,” Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s mayor, said during a briefing on the dire weather. “No one.”

Five Chicago buses were scheduled to make their way around the city overnight into Wednesday, so that homeless people might at least warm up on the buses — transformed into mobile warming centers — if they wouldn’t accept other shelter.

“No one should be on the street during this weather,” said Lisa Morrison Butler, Chicago’s commissioner of the Department of Family and Support Services.

Douglas Schenkelberg, executive director of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, said that as the extreme cold began to set in, fewer homeless people appeared to be on the streets. With all the warnings, he said, people were finding emergency housing, staying with friends and family, seeking out a bed at a homeless shelter or visiting an emergency warming center provided by the city.

The problem, Schenkelberg said, is what happens after the weather gets a little better.

“We’ll have this really bad weather through Thursday and then it will warm up some, and the scaled-up capacity will disappear, and you’ll see people back on the streets, and those people need housing,” he said. “That sense of urgency completely disappears when the crisis goes away.”

Along Michigan Avenue on Tuesday, not far from a stretch of glimmering retail stores known as Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, a man sat cross-legged on the ground under a gray blanket, a green bowl for loose change in front of him.

He said he was trying to get $20 to pay for a room he is permitted to stay in for that price. He said his name was Andre Jones, and he had a cardboard sign that read: “Homeless and cold. God Bless!”

A passing office worker, covered in down clothing and shielded under a scarf, looked over, horrified: “You should not be out,” she told him, promising to return from her office with some assistance. A passing motorist also stopped, pulled over and handed a dollar bill from his window, noting that it was far too cold to even be sitting there.

“I’ve almost got enough for a room for tonight,” he said. “Trust me, I’m going to raise it. There’s no way I’m going to be out here tonight.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="74eb2267-0424-490d-b12a-202696fe7be7" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/us/homeless-midwest-polar-vortex.html">The New York Times</a>.

'I'm Cold and I'm Afraid': Homeless Brace for Frigid Temperatures

What about the prospect of going to one of the scores of shelters officials in Chicago — and in cities like Minneapolis, Milwaukee and Detroit — had urged homeless people to seek warmth in during the stretch of dangerous and extreme cold?

'I'm cold and I'm afraid': Homeless brace for frigid temperatures

The severity of the threat was expected to be at its worst Wednesday, a day that forecasters said could deliver actual temperatures in the minus double digits and windchill readings as low as 50 or 60 degrees below zero. Wind aside, the high temperature in Chicago was expected to be 13 degrees below zero, the low 23 degrees below zero, according to predictions Tuesday afternoon. In Duluth, Minnesota, the low was even lower: 25 degrees below zero.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/us/homeless-midwest-polar-vortex.html" id="7c563e6f-3705-3782-ab5f-a9a8cbce4a8b">The New York Times</a>.

CHICAGO — As temperatures in Midwestern cities plunged to levels colder than parts of Antarctica and officials warned people not to step outside even for a few minutes, Tony Neeley stood on a downtown Chicago street corner Tuesday, wearing wet sneakers and clutching a hand warmer packet in each of his bare hands. He had already been there for hours.

<h1>CHICAGO — Three Chicago police officers were acquitted Thursday of charges they had conspired and lied to protect a white police officer who fired 16 deadly shots into a black teenager, a contentious verdict in a case over what many viewed as a “code of silence” in the Police Department.</h1>

The judgment was delivered by a judge and not a jury. Associate Judge Domenica Stephenson rejected the prosecutors’ arguments the officers had shooed away witnesses and then created a narrative to justify the 2014 shooting, which prompted citywide protests, the firing of the police chief and a wide-ranging federal investigation into the police force.

The ruling came more than three months after Officer Jason Van Dyke was convicted in October of the second-degree murder of Laquan McDonald, and on the afternoon before he was scheduled to be sentenced for a killing that was captured on an infamous police dashboard camera video.

The three police officers — David March, Joseph Walsh and Thomas Gaffney — contradicted what the video showed. In it, Van Dyke fires repeatedly at McDonald, who is wielding a knife, as he moves slightly away from the officers and even as he lies crumpled on the ground. Prosecutors cited that footage repeatedly as they built a case against the officers, who are white, on charges of conspiracy, official misconduct and obstruction of justice.

Stephenson said that even though the officers’ accounts of the shooting differed from the videos, that did not amount to proof that they were lying. “Two people with two different vantage points can witness the same event,” she said, and still describe it differently.

The officers, who were brought to trial in November, were accused of writing in official reports that McDonald had tried to stab three other officers, saying they saw him trying to get up from the ground even after a barrage of shots.

Walsh, who was Van Dyke’s partner on the night of the shooting and who has resigned from the department, said little. The experience has been “heartbreaking for my family,” he said. “A year and a half.”

“The verdict says to police officers that you can lie, cheat, steal, rape, rob and pillage, and it’s OK,” said the Rev. Marvin Hunter, who is McDonald’s great-uncle.

This article originally appeared in <a id="45eac5ec-088d-429a-a2af-644f486ccd30" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/us/laquan-mcdonald-chicago-police-coverup.html">The New York Times</a>.

Judge Finds No 'Code of Silence' in Police Killing of Black Youth

The judgment was delivered by a judge and not a jury.

Judge finds no 'code of silence' in police killing of black youth

The judgment, rendered in a tense, cramped courtroom overflowing with spectators, was delivered by a judge and not a jury. Speaking from the bench for close to an hour, Associate Judge Domenica Stephenson rejected the prosecutors’ arguments that the officers had shooed away witnesses and then created a narrative to justify the 2014 shooting, which prompted citywide protests, the firing of the police chief and a wide-ranging federal investigation into the police force.

The judge suggested that key witnesses for the prosecution had offered conflicting testimony, and said there was nothing presented at trial that showed the officers had failed to preserve evidence, as the prosecutors had argued. Challenging the point that officers had shooed away a witness as part of a cover-up, the judge said it was not obvious that police had known the witness had seen the shooting.

March, Walsh and Gaffney each denied that they conspired to come up with a narrative that might justify Van Dyke’s decision to shoot McDonald. None of them fired any shots that night. Other officers, too, had witnessed the shooting and had given questionable accounts, but were not on trial; grand jurors indicted the three officers but declined to indict any others.

It was “undisputed and undeniable,” Stephenson said, that McDonald had ignored officers’ commands to drop his knife. While she spoke, the three officers sat silently, sometimes staring down at the carpet or nervously jiggling a leg. After she read the verdict, several people broke into applause.

Todd Pugh, a lawyer for Walsh, said afterward that the judge had acted with courage in rendering her verdict, despite what he called public pressure to find the officers guilty. “There never ever was a case,” he told reporters, adding that the grand jury had proved the axiom that it would indict a ham sandwich if given the opportunity.

A group of ministers who gathered at the courthouse denounced the outcome. The Rev. Leon Finney, a pastor on Chicago’s South Side, called it a “travesty.”

“There was clearly evidence from the video that Laquan McDonald was not attacking or seeking to attack any of the law enforcement officers,” Finney said. “How could they all three make up a story indicating that Laquan was threatening their lives?”

Toni Preckwinkle, the Cook County Board president who is a candidate for mayor, called the decision “a devastating step backward.”

“Laquan’s murder has become a part of the fabric of our city,” she said. “The verdict today does not serve justice in wake of the senseless loss of a young life.”

Speaking to reporters at the courthouse, Patricia Brown Holmes, the special prosecutor, said that while she disagreed with the judge’s ruling, she hoped that the trial had sent a message.

Holmes said she hoped that “others will think twice before engaging in conduct that might land them in an investigation such as this.”

“Hopefully one day there won’t be a code of silence,” she said.

Along with the officers, the broad concept of a police code of silence was on trial in Chicago, where officers have been accused for decades of covering up their colleagues’ misconduct.

As in other cities, residents have long complained that police officers stuck together when it came to accounting for their actions, and the issue has come up in cases involving drunken driving, the beating of a bartender and a lawsuit by two officers who said they faced retaliation after breaking the code. Even the city’s mayor, Rahm Emanuel, has acknowledged it.

In a speech in 2015, Emanuel condemned what he said was a tendency of some officers to ignore, deny and in “some cases cover up the bad actions of a colleague or colleagues.”

March, who also resigned, had been assigned to investigate the shooting. He merely wrote down what the witnesses told him had happened, a lawyer for March told the court during trial. Gaffney was one of the officers who first confronted McDonald on the evening of the shooting, after police got a report of a man breaking into trucks on the city’s Southwest Side. He and other officers had followed the teenager, who was carrying a knife and ignoring orders to stop, for several blocks.

In a statement, Emanuel and Eddie Johnson, superintendent of the Chicago Police, vowed that their work to improve the department would not stop.

“We will continue to take concrete steps to restore trust with communities across Chicago,” the statement said, “because trust is the best public safety tool we have.”

There were no protests after the verdicts were read, and William Calloway, a prominent Chicago activist who is running for City Council, urged Chicagoans to refrain. “To the black community, I know this hurts,” he said on Twitter. “We know this was a cover-up. I’m not saying take to the streets anymore. It’s time for us to take to the polls.”

“That blue code of silence is just not with the Chicago Police Department: It expands to the judicial system,” Calloway said at a news conference.

With the final chapter of the McDonald case — a killing that came amid a national conversation about police shootings of black people — scheduled for Friday, a Facebook group implored a “call to action.” “In room 500 at 9 a.m., show up to stand in solidarity with organizers and the family of Laquan McDonald as we demand, again, #Justice4Laquan.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/us/laquan-mcdonald-chicago-police-coverup.html" id="37de0421-33a8-36bd-a9d1-400d41f814f9">The New York Times</a>.

CHICAGO — Three Chicago police officers were acquitted Thursday of charges that they had conspired and lied to protect a white police officer who fired 16 deadly shots into a black teenager, a contentious verdict in a case over what many viewed as a “code of silence” in the Police Department.

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