A 53-year-old man fatally shot himself on Monday morning in Chicago's Back of the Yards neighbourhood as a federal fugitive task force prepared to arrest him at a South Side home, Chicago police said.
Members of the U.S. Marshals Great Lakes Regional Fugitive Task Force, which includes Chicago Police Department officers, were preparing to serve an arrest warrant at a home in the 5400 block of South Hermitage Avenue at around 9:35 a.m. on Monday, November 9, when the man, who was the subject of the warrant, shot himself, police said.
Source: Chicago Sun-Times via WFB News
What police say happened
The man was taken to the University of Chicago Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead about an hour later, according to the Cook County medical examiner's office, the Sun-Times reported. Police said a weapon was recovered at the scene and that no officers fired their weapons.
ABC7 Chicago (WLS-TV) and WGN-TV also reported the death from the scene on Monday, describing a large law-enforcement presence on South Hermitage Avenue; WGN reported that law enforcement did not fire a weapon and that the surrounding neighbourhood was put on lockdown during the operation.
Police have not publicly named the man in the reports published so far, and the reports do not state what charge the arrest warrant concerned. Those details are therefore not reported here.
Who is investigating
The Chicago Police Department's Investigative Response Team is investigating, police said. That team is the department unit that examines incidents involving police, and its role here includes establishing, independently of the task force's own account, exactly what happened inside and around the home before and during the man's death.
The Cook County medical examiner's office said an autopsy was scheduled for Tuesday, November 10, to determine the cause and manner of death. The examiner's finding, not the first police account, is the official record of how the man died.
Background: the task force and the neighbourhood
The Great Lakes Regional Fugitive Task Force is a U.S. Marshals-led team that pairs federal officers with state and local officers, including Chicago police, to find and arrest people wanted on warrants across the Chicago region. Because its operations bring federal and city officers into residential blocks together, any death during one of its warrant services is investigated as a police-involved incident even when, as police say happened here, no officer fired.
Back of the Yards is a long-established working-class neighbourhood on Chicago's South Side, named for the Union Stock Yards that once stood nearby. Monday's operation drew a heavy police presence to a residential block of Hermitage Avenue, and neighbours faced a lockdown while officers secured the scene, according to WGN's reporting.
What happens next
The next confirmed steps are the medical examiner's autopsy on Tuesday and the Investigative Response Team's inquiry. Until those are complete, the man's name, the reason for the warrant and any further official account of the minutes before his death remain unreleased in the published reports. This story will be read against those findings when they are made public.
In the United States, people in crisis can call or text 988 at any time to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. In Canada, Canada Suicide Prevention Service can be reached at 1-833-456-4566.