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In final weeks, Laquan McDonald tried to turn around troubled life

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Chicago Tribune

Laquan McDonald said little, if anything, to Chicago police as they tried to detain him last year for breaking into trucks while carrying a knife.

What was going through his 17-year-old mind on that stretch of Pulaski Road before he was fatally shot by a Chicago police officer won’t ever be known.

But in the teen’s final month, some caught a glimpse of a kid who showed signs of hope and promise to maybe untangle himself from a troubled life.

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Warning: This video contains graphic content. Chicago officials released the police dash-cam video of the October 2014 fatal shooting of Laquan McDonald, 17, by a Chicago police officer. The Chicago Tribune edited this version only for length.

“He would come up every morning and hug me, and he would do that with a lot of teachers,” Ashley Beverly, one of his teachers at an alternative high school he attended, told the Tribune in an interview earlier this year. “He really liked being here. ... (It) was a safe place for him.”

According to court records, McDonald’s father abandoned the family and had “no presence” in his life. At 3, McDonald became a ward of the state when the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services took him into protective custody over allegations that his mother had neglected him, according to state records.

He spent about two months in foster care before he was moved to a relative’s home and eventually back to his mother in 2002. But after just a little more than a year, he was again back in foster care when his mother’s boyfriend beat him, causing cuts, welts and bruises, according to the records.

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McDonald was placed with his great-grandmother in 2003, and she eventually became his legal guardian. He lived with her for about a decade before she died in 2013 and he was placed with an uncle.

Court files show he racked up numerous juvenile arrests and had spent time in juvenile lockup.

By May 2014, he was released from detention after four months there and returned to the care of his uncle. And his mother was petitioning the court for custody.

McDonald enrolled in Sullivan House Alternative School in September 2014, a month before his shooting. In the few weeks he had been there, staff said he was engaged. He tended to arrive early, ahead of the 8 a.m. start, they said.

“He was forming really good relationships with a lot of the teachers in the class,” Beverly said. “He wanted to be at school. He was here early a lot of days.”

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McDonald, who was tall at 6-foot-2, liked to rap and dance, his teacher recalled. And he was happy.

“He was a really funny kid,” Beverly said. “The things he would say were hilarious.”

On the day he died, McDonald had PCP in his system, autopsy results showed.

McDonald’s funeral was eight days after he was shot. With the obituary, there is a grade school photo of him in a red graduation gown. In it, he smiles awkwardly, holding his diploma.

His younger sister read a poem called “My Brother.”

Michael Robbins, a family attorney, said he believed the adults who were working with Laquan — from social workers to teachers — saw promise in him at the time of his death.

“They saw ... progress in him trying to turn things around,” Robbins said.

Chicago Tribune’s Jeremy Gorner contributed.

asweeney@tribpub.com

Twitter: @annie1221

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