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The officers' accounts of the shooting were contradicted by a witness, Laticia Whitehead, who said she saw Green running full speed away from the police and that he never turned before Gonzalez opened fire. After the boy jerked and fell to the ground, Whitehead said, the officer who shot him got out of the vehicle, put a foot on his motionless body and started yelling.
"Mother-! You wanna run? Huh? Huh?" Whitehead quoted the officer as saying in a recorded deposition played in court. "You see how f-far you got?"
The jury, meanwhile, was barred from hearing about the connection between the officers on the scene that day and the allegedly corrupt tactical squad led by then-Sgt. Watts, who along with another member of the team was sent to federal prison in 2013 for shaking down a drug courier for protection money at the now-shuttered Ida B. Wells housing complex.
Gonzalez, Leano and Nichols were all investigated by the Police Department's Internal Affairs Division as well as the FBI for their role in Watts' team but were never charged, according to court records.
The Tribune has written several front-page stories since last year detailing the fallout over Watts' nearly decadelong run of corruption. So far, four drug convictions involving three defendants have been tossed out because of Watts' tainted history. In addition, two officers who maintained they were victims of the "code of silence" won a $2 million settlement to their whistleblower lawsuit that alleged they were blackballed for trying to expose Watts' corruption years ago.
On Monday, while the jury was deliberating the Green shooting case, Gonzalez was named in a new federal lawsuit brought by Lionel White alleging Gonzalez helped Watts pin a drug case on him to help out a rival drug dealer at the Ida B. Wells public housing development.