Protesters congregated on Chicago’s West Side on Monday after the fatal shooting of 19-year-old Roshad McIntosh, who was gunned down by law enforcement on Sunday, DNAinfo Chicago reports.
Officers were responding to a call regarding armed men when they encountered McIntosh, who allegedly started to run when they tried to speak to him.
Law enforcement maintains that the young man pulled a gun first after a chase into a narrow walkway, the news site notes. This allegedly prompted the officer at whom the weapon was pointed to fire at McIntosh, killing him.
The police said that they did take a weapon from the scene.
Tempers and mistrust have flared within the community, where family and friends refuse to believe police reports.
"I want my baby; they killed my baby," McIntosh’s mother, Cynthia Lane, said.
"It's like [the police and politicians] are at war with us," said Marcia Sloan, who helped organize the protest, according to DNAinfo Chicago. "They can't keep coming into our community and killing our kids.”
Protesters are insisting that McIntosh was unarmed and surrendering—with his hands in the air and his knees to the ground—when he was killed. Police, protesters believe, are too quick to shoot, DNAinfo Chicago notes.
The parallels to the ongoing protests in the police shooting death of Ferguson, Mo., teen Michael Brown have not gone unnoticed. Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said that the officers involved in the two deaths felt that their lives were in danger. "In both cases, we have firearms recovered from the scenes, and in both cases, the officers were in fear for their lives," McCarthy said Monday at an unrelated press conference, according to the news site.
However, while he did not go into much detail about the incident in Chicago, he did emphasize that police response to the protests in his city would not mimic those in Ferguson in any way. "There's a lot of lessons learned when you see incidents go bad like this," he said.
McIntosh was one of two men who were killed by law enforcement in Chicago that Sunday. Police say that 20-year-old Desean Pittman confronted officers with a gun and refused to put it down, the news site noted in another report; an officer then shot and killed him.
The Independent Police Review Authority is looking into both shootings, according to DNAinfo Chicago.