Bodycam Shows Chicago Cop Waited 90 Seconds After Shooting Partner

Body camera footage released Friday shows Chicago Police Officer Carlos Baker sat in a stairwell for more than 90 seconds after shooting his partner, Officer Krystal Rivera, last summer, leaving her bleeding on the floor while he called for help from above.

The footage, released by the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability, captures the incident from Baker’s perspective. The two officers had been chasing a man into an apartment building when Baker kicked open a door and encountered a second man who appeared to be aiming a gun at the officers. Baker turned, appeared to trip, and fired the shot that struck Rivera. He then ran up a stairwell.

He didn’t render aid.

When Baker returned down the stairs, he stepped over Rivera’s lifeless body before eventually bringing her down the stairwell. The video footage, according to COPA, doesn’t show Baker providing any medical assistance to Rivera at any point.

Baker told a COPA investigator a different story about his state of mind. “I will die for her, that I had to get to her,” he said, according to a recording obtained by the Illinois Answers Project and the Chicago Sun-Times. “Because she’s so strong and I told her that I would never, never let anything happen to her.”

His account of the shooting itself centered on what he called a “fatal funnel,” a tactical term for a dangerous confined space. Baker said he believed a man inside the apartment was aiming a rifle directly at him through the breached doorway. “I thought I was about to die in that doorway because action, as we’re taught, action beats reaction,” he said. “I dove out of the way and that was when I heard a pop.”

Rivera’s death was the first fatal officer-on-officer shooting in Chicago in nearly 40 years. It was also the first such incident since the Chicago Police Department adopted body-worn cameras broadly in the 2010s, which made the footage’s release a matter of significant public interest and legal scrutiny.

COPA released only two videos tied to Rivera’s death. The agency didn’t say how many recordings it withheld, a departure from past practice that appears to conflict with city policy requiring disclosure of videos and investigative reports when a shooting involves an officer.

That omission hasn’t gone unnoticed.

Accountability advocates and civil liberties groups have long pressed Chicago to treat officer-involved shootings with full transparency, particularly when the victim is another officer and the circumstances are disputed. The Chicago Police Department’s use-of-force policies, updated after the Laquan McDonald fallout, require officers to render aid to wounded individuals when it’s safe to do so. Whether Baker’s 90-second delay met that standard is one of the central questions COPA investigators are examining.

Baker initially told investigators the gunshot that hit Rivera had been fired by someone else. The body camera footage contradicts that account. It shows Baker’s own weapon discharging in the moments after he turned away from the apartment doorway, and it shows Rivera falling. Baker’s attorneys have not issued a public statement on the footage.

Rivera had been a Chicago police officer working the same unit as Baker on the night of the shooting last summer. Her death sent a shock through the department and through her Pilsen neighborhood, where she had grown up and where residents held vigils in the days after she died.

The 90 seconds Baker spent in the stairwell, captured in the footage frame by frame, will likely sit at the center of any criminal or administrative proceeding. Prosecutors and COPA investigators will have to weigh his stated belief that he was still under active threat against what the video shows: a wounded officer left alone on the floor while her partner waited above her.

COPA hasn’t announced whether it has completed its investigation or referred the case to the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office for potential charges. No arrest has been made. The department has not said whether Baker remains on the force or on administrative duty.

Rivera’s family has retained legal counsel, according to records filed in Cook County Circuit Court. Their attorney didn’t respond to a request for comment.