Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Carlishia Hood is already suing the city of Chicago and five police officers over the arrest of her and her 14-year-old son on murder charges after the Cook Country State’s Attorney’s dropped the charges citing “emerging evidence” that shows the teenager shot a man who was attacking Hood inside a Chicago hot dog stand. Now Hood says the prosecutors presented a false narrative to the court before those charges were dropped, which makes me wonder if Kim Foxx isn’t the next official to be sued.
Hood made her comments in a livestream with Chicago activist Jedediah Brown earlier this week, after Brown first claimed that the prosecution’s recounting of the incident not only left out important details, but was in direct conflict with what actually happened.
Hood revealed many details about her experiences over the past week during the Facebook Live stream hosted by community activist Jedidiah Brown. But one of the most surprising was this: Although prosecutors said her son stayed in the car while she went into the restaurant, Hood says she told her son to return to the car so he would not be exposed to the brewing argument.
Near the end of the 36-minute-long stream, Brown spoke with someone off-screen, but the unseen person could not be heard clearly. Brown asked the person if they wanted to say it on camera, then personally provided a stunning claim: Hood never texted her son to ask him to do anything.
That directly contradicts McCord’s allegation in court that “during the course of the verbal altercation [Hood] began texting her son and pointing at him outside.”
“She never told him, she never texted him, she never called him. She never asked him to do anything,” Brown said. “She protected her son. She told him to go to the car…”
At that point, Hood walked into camera view.
“For a fact, a big fact, and anybody who truly knows me, ok, my kids are my everything. I wouldn’t dare have my son, I already knew something was off, but, like I said, for the most part, I would never put my kids in a situation like that, neither one of them,” she said.
“I didn’t even want my son to witness it. That’s why I said to go to the car because he overheard the argument,” Hood told viewers Wednesday.
Brown appeared ready to say even more, but he abruptly ended the stream after a woman, possibly Hood, was heard crying off-camera.
If there are no text messages from Hood telling her son to bring her gun into the restaurant, then why did prosecutors present that information to the judge as if it were a fact?
According to prosecutors, Hood also tried to get her son to shoot another woman in the restaurant who’d allegedly egged on 32-year-old Jeremy Brown, though it doesn’t appear that they offered any actual evidence that was the case either. That begs the question of where, exactly, this information came from, as well as what, if anything, was done to try to corroborate that account before murder charges were filed.
In fact, I’d say it’s actually worse than prosecutors relying on bad information in their decision to charge Hood and her son. According to CBS News, the State’s Attorney’s office was already aware that Brown was punching Hood when her son entered the restaurant with her legally purchased and lawfully possessed firearm, shooting the man who was attacking his mom as she waited for her food.
CBS 2 Legal Analyst Irv Miller said criminal charges, let alone murder charges, never should have been approved in this case.
“You have the right to use deadly force to stop that force against another person, and that’s exactly what happened in this case, and that’s exactly why the state’s attorney’s office dropped this case today,” Miller said. “This goes beyond an injustice. Frankly, it’s a miscarriage of justice as to what happened to this woman and her son. It’s a situation where either the charges should have been rejected, or at the very minimum they should have been continued for investigation, rather than just, you know, say, ‘Okay, murder charge. Send them to court.'”
Police initially released security video from inside the Maxwell Street Express that only showed Hood and her son – the latter with his face blurred as he pulls a gun.
But then, cellphone video, also from inside the Maxwell Street Express, surfaced on social media. The video shows Brown threatening and punching Hood in the head as they stand in line at the short-order eatery – and attacking her into a corner – before her son fired the shot.
“I don’t know where the mistake is,” Miller said. “I think there’re multiple mistakes.”
Considering the angle of the security camera inside the restaurant, why did investigations not release the portion of the video showing Brown beating Hood?
In court documents, an assistant state’s attorney even stated Brown “punched (Hood) in the head three times” – but never brings up self-defense.
Prosecutors also stated Hood’s son “fired additional shots” at Brown, but the portion of the security video they released never shows that.
Why not? Why did it take the video showing Brown attacking Hood for the State’s Attorney’s office to state they could no longer meet their burden of proof in the case?
“I think the State’s Attorney owed a little bit more to the family and to the public as to what happened in this case, why it went this far,” said Miller. “It should not have gotten this far.”
These are all perfectly reasonable things to ask, but so far Foxx has refused to answer them even though she’s not being sued by Hood… at least not at the moment. It certainly sounds, however, like both the initial police investigation and the subsequent release of information by the State’s Attorney was designed to create a narrative that bolstered the murder charges against Hood and son while ignoring or downplaying all evidence to the contrary. Only when that cell phone video capturing the incident went viral did Foxx’s office reverse course citing “emerging” evidence, though it appears that evidence was actually available to investigators all along.
I’m glad that Hood is pursuing legal action against the city of Chicago here, because it’s probably the only way she and the public will get answers to the deeply troubling questions surrounding the arrests and initial charging decision. Hopefully the city’s initial response to the lawsuit will shed at least a little light on how this narrative got crafted, but I’m not holding my breath. In fact, I expect that the city will try to settle Hood’s lawsuit long before it reaches the discovery phase, especially if the real facts would raise big problems for the Chicago police and the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.