In 2012, while working full time, Van Dyke completed his bachelor's degree in criminal justice at St. Xavier University, according to the school and his personnel file.
In more than a dozen years on the street, Van Dyke worked at night in mostly high-crime districts, including Englewood and Chicago Lawn. He was picked to take part in a targeted response unit that aggressively went into neighborhoods hit by spikes in violent crimes before police brass abandoned that strategy.
Tiffany Van Dyke said he always called at their daughters' bedtime to say good night. She got used to sleeping alone and, she said, in time overcame fears he would not make it home safely.
"He has a very good head on his shoulders," she said. "He does not run to danger."
She said her husband rarely opened up to her about all the violence. Department records show he's been spit on, kicked, punched, surrounded by an angry mob and threatened at least twice with knives.
Instead he chose to share with her the good moments, including times he helped lock up a guy "causing terror to a neighborhood, taking back a park" so the kids could play on the basketball court, she said.
Once, some six years ago, Van Dyke came home about 2 a.m. with a "mutt mix" he kept noticing roaming the streets alone in the cold while he was out on patrol in Englewood. She's been the family dog ever since.
But Tiffany Van Dyke said her and her husband's opposite personalities at times clashed during their marriage, and the two were in counseling before McDonald's shooting. She said his years internalizing the bad he saw — raped children, shooting victims, car crash fatalities — made him even more closed-off emotionally.
"When you start out and you're so optimistic about helping others ... but unfortunately, people don't want the help any longer or they don't trust you to be able to help them, it does change you," she said. "It doesn't make him a bad person ... but it does take a toll and does make a person different.
"His favorite thing, he used to say, was he loved to drive through a neighborhood and see someone wave to him and he'd wave back," she said. "And unfortunately, as time went by, that got less and less and less because the crime and violence got worse and worse and worse."
Warning signs?
Van Dyke has received 53 commendations over his career, according to his personnel file. His wife said one of his proudest moments came in January 2013 when he helped secure the parade route at President Barack Obama's inauguration in Washington.
"He was never considered a guy who was violent," said Richard Aztlan, a former Chicago police sergeant who until his 2010 retirement supervised Van Dyke when he picked up extra assignments with the mass transit unit. "As a sergeant, there were times I had to worry about certain guys. He wasn't one of those."
But there were complaints, lots of them. Under the Police Department's accountability system, however, Van Dyke was never disciplined, his records showed. That accountability system has come under criticism for being biased in favor of the police and flawed at every level, with police often enforcing a code of silence, unions protecting them from rigorous scrutiny and an ineffective review process.
Van Dyke also was sued three times, twice successfully. In a fourth case — the McDonald shooting — the city paid out $5 million to the family before a lawsuit was filed.
That puts him in unflattering company. Earlier this year, a Tribune investigation found that only 1 percent of the city's more than 12,000 officers had at least three legal settlements or financial judgments in which the city paid out money over a 6 1/2-year period, from January 2009 through July 2015. More than 4 out every 5 officers weren't named in a single such lawsuit.
Over a slightly different 6 1/2-year period than the one in the Tribune investigation, the city paid out three times in cases involving Van Dyke. In addition to the $5 million for the McDonald shooting, they were:
A federal jury in October 2009 awarded a black motorist $350,000 for injuries he suffered in a traffic stop. In a Tribune interview last year, Ed Nance said that after Van Dyke's partner slammed him over the hood of a squad car, Van Dyke handcuffed him so violently that it cost him thousands of dollars in medical bills and lost wages to repair tendons in his shoulder and rotator cuff. Nance did not have prior criminal convictions.
In February the city settled a lawsuit involving Van Dyke and another officer for nearly $100,000. After his arrest in April 2014 in a domestic dispute, Darren Clemons said the two officers beat him while he was handcuffed, fracturing his left eye socket. Clemons, who has an extensive criminal record, showed the Tribune medical documentation, but the arrest report claimed another man said he punched Clemons to restrain him before police arrived. Van Dyke's attorney argued that the city simply settled to make the case involving its most infamous cop go away.
Van Dyke "shouldn't have been a cop," Clemons said.
In the third suit, a federal judge in 2010 dismissed a black teenager's claim against six police officers, including Van Dyke. The lawsuit alleged excessive force and other civil rights violations for an August 2007 arrest on gun possession charges that ended in the teen's acquittal. Another officer handled the actual arrest of Denzel Nelson, who also had a clean record, but the unsuccessful suit alleged that Van Dyke lied to protect the other officer.
Officers who use force during an arrest are supposed to document it in what's called a "tactical response report." Van Dyke never self-reported the arrests of Nance, Nelson or Clemons, but he filled out nearly two dozen tactical response reports when he used force from 2004 until he shot McDonald in October 2014, according to department records reviewed by the Tribune. Three of those arrestees allegedly had knives, one had a history of mental hospitalizations and several were accused of being combative, intoxicated or on drugs.
In one report, Van Dyke described a woman as drunk and violent after he arrested her in August 2008 following a 4 a.m. skirmish inside a Bucktown restaurant while the officer was off-duty.
But Erica Torres told the Tribune she hadn't done anything wrong. She later had her misdemeanor battery arrest expunged.
"He manhandled me," Torres said. "He just had this blank stare on his face."
In nearly all of the 22 incidents in which he admitted using force, he checked a box indicating he used "take down/emergency handcuffing" measures. A few times he reported using pepper spray as well as his police baton to fend off a mob after he said one officer was punched and another grabbed.
