Videos released Friday show Chicago Police Officer Krystal Rivera being shot and killed by her partner during a June 5 chase inside an apartment building on the South Side, a death that was later ruled a homicide. Rivera, 36, died from friendly fire after officers tried to stop a man in the 8200 block of South Drexel Avenue around 9:50 p.m. and followed him into a building in Chatham.
The bodycam footage shows Rivera and Carlos Baker running up a flight of stairs after the suspect, later identified as Adrian Rucker. Baker kicked open a door, and video showed another man pointing what appeared to be a rifle at the doorway. Baker’s camera then shows him falling out of the doorway and firing a shot behind him where Rivera was in pursuit. He radioed, “shots fired at police,” retreated up another flight of stairs and then asked, “Krystal, you good?” before calling for an ambulance.
What followed on the video is the part Rivera’s family and their lawyers have centered on. Baker dragged her down another flight of stairs as responding officers rendered aid, while Rucker ran from the residence before later being taken into custody. Three guns were recovered at the scene, and Rivera was taken to a nearby hospital, where she died from a gunshot wound to the back.
The shooting unfolded during a fast-moving pursuit in a cramped apartment building, but the footage has also become central to a legal fight over what Baker did after the gunfire. The Chicago Police Department officer who shot and killed Rivera has been relieved of his police powers, and Rivera’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit last December against the department and Baker. The suit says Baker was struggling to accept the end of his romantic relationship with Rivera when he shot and killed her during the chase.
Attorney Antonio Romanucci said Baker never rendered aid after Rivera was wounded, ran to a different floor of the building and did not radio dispatch that she had been shot. He said Rivera, in a weak voice, tried to alert dispatch herself but was unable to do so because of the severity of her injuries. The attorneys also said Baker “never admitted or clarified that he was the only one who discharged a weapon.”
For Rivera’s family, the videos now make public the final seconds of a death that investigators have already labeled a homicide. For Baker and the department, they sharpen the unanswered question at the center of the lawsuit: whether the shooting was a tragic split-second mistake, or the result of decisions that went far beyond the moment Rivera was struck.