Teenager Survived Chicago’s Worst Neighborhood Only to be Killed by Police
Pierre Loury was a paradoxical older brother. This is not to say that he was bad person but may have made some questionable decisions based on the influences of his environment. He encouraged his younger brother to stay in school but constantly skipped class. He wanted his brother to play sports and have positive influences outside of gangs but joined the New Breeds, one of Chicago’s many street gangs, at the age of 10 and had a tattoo across his neck memorializing one of his friends lost to the streets.
He ran away from home after a fight with his mother and moved in with friends living in North Lawndale, a community fueled by drugs and violence, at one point an time the police closed it down for three weeks while they irradiated a 3.4 million dollar heroin operation. The police also blamed the operation for as many 50 shootings. Still teenage Loury was able to survive the environment that surrounded him.
We never knew he was doing all this stuff because we gave him his privacy, said Vantrease Frazier, Loury’s step father.
Pierre Loury wasn’t just a teenager posing as street thug in order to cope with family problems. He had converted his closet into a recording studio where he recorded music for hours as an aspiring artist and after college the sixteen year old dreamed of becoming an engineer. Unfortunately he never made it that far, he died in an alley after being shot by one of Chicago’s finest on April 11, 2016.
“He was becoming a man,” said his stepfather, Vantrease Frazier, who disputes the police account. “You know every teenage boy made mistakes and did stuff they ain’t supposed to do, but you got to learn from that.”
According to an eye witness who said she feared law enforcement persecution and wished to remain anonymous, Loury was in the air when the police shot him. He was trying to jump a fence in order to evade the same Chicago police officer that killed him. The police version is different but everyone should be used to the police tailoring the facts in order to support the actions of the officer involved.
“They shot him in the air,” she said. “His pants leg got caught on the fence and he hit the ground. If he hadn’t gotten shot, he would have cleared the fence.” – unidentified eye witness.
Law enforcement confirmed Loury clothes were caught in the fence and he was trying to jump the fence before he was shot. If that were true how is it possible for him to be also be pointing a gun the officer who was chasing down the alley?
According to First Deputy Superintendent John Escalante of the Chicago Police Department, Loury had threatened the officer by pointing a gun at him. A video circulated on social media and posted on youtube shows Loury lying at the bas of the fence. His pants appear to be caught in the fence and torn.
Did Loury point a weapon at this cop, or did this officer decide that making him chase you is punishable by death? Are the police covering up the facts in order to protect the officer involved, or is the eye witness lying about what she saw?
These questions and so many more will never be answered because no video exists. Without the transparency provided by the camera lens we can only look at the information and decide for ourselves if we believe this is just another incident of police abuse in Chicago. Everyday for the past 4 years American police have killed an average of three people a day and the amount that have been brutalized is impossible to estimate. We are surrounded by a domestic military with the permission to use force in order to gain your compliance.
This is why it is so important to film the police. Not to gain accountability but to expose the violence of these thugs and shift the conversation away from removing the few bad apples and begin talking about abolishing the whole damn system.
