On January 7, 2013, shortly before 2 PM, Chicago police officers Kevin Fry and Lou Toth were driving westbound on 75th Street, in a poor, African-American section of the South Shore neighborhood. They were in plainclothes in an unmarked Crown Victoria. As they approached Essex Avenue, a silver Dodge Charger, northbound on Essex, cruised through a stop sign and turned left on 75th, not far in front of the officers. The driver was alone in the car.

Toth got on the radio and asked if the Charger was the vehicle taken in the carjacking. The dispatcher said it was, and also told him it had Wisconsin plates.

With his Sig Sauer .45 semiautomatic pistol in his right hand, Fry began running diagonally across 75th. He was in the middle of the street, ten or 15 feet from the north-south crosswalk just east of Jeffery Boulevard, when the suspect reached the corner. Toth had lost ground and was eight to 12 feet behind him, Fry would later estimate.

The shooting of Cedrick Chatman happened before any of these police shootings—and, like most such shootings, it made headlines immediately after it occurred, and then quickly disappeared from the public eye.

But the picture Camden painted had some flaws. The car wasn’t taken at gunpoint, or with any weapon—nor did the radio report Fry and Toth heard describe the crime as an armed carjacking. Neither officer hollered anything about Chatman having something in his hand; nothing was said by either officer from the time Chatman fled the car until he was shot, Fry and Toth acknowledged in depositions last summer. And Chatman didn’t point anything at either officer, Fry and Toth also acknowledged. Toth said he never saw anything in Chatman’s hands. Before Fry fired, Chatman made “a body motioning toward his right side,” Toth said. Fry said he saw something dark in Chatman’s hands, assumed it was a gun, and fired when Chatman made a “slight movement” to his right.

Better to let the jury see the videos for the first time at trial, with “fresh eyes,” the city’s lawyers said in their motion, and with “full context of the stories of the officers who were present and the multiple experts whom are likely to be retained in this case.”