How could an incident that began with the responding officers assessing the situation and deciding they needed a Taser end a few minutes later with 16 bullets striking Laquan McDonald?
Credit: Wikimedia Commons

An autopsy tells a story. The genre is mystery: a narrative set in motion by a corpse. The pathologist-narrator investigates the cause of death in precise, descriptive prose that ultimately allows the dead to testify about what happened to them. In the case of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old black youth killed by Chicago police on Oct. 20, 2014, the autopsy raises questions not only about how he died, but about how the Chicago Police Department has handled the case since. While it does not provide all the details of what transpired that night, the autopsy makes one thing clear: The account of the incident given by the […]