Christopher Anderson's mother believes he would still be alive had state troopers patted him down at the scene of a car crash hours before he was shot inside a Highland Park emergency room.
"He should have been frisked. All of this could have been prevented," said Venus Anderson, whose son was killed by Highland Park police last month when authorities said he pulled a handgun from his waistband at NorthShore Highland Park Hospital and refused multiple requests to put it down.
The tragedy of the situation — that had state police frisked Anderson at the crash scene, authorities likely would not have needed to resort to lethal force against him later — underscores the complex set of legal and ethical factors that officers routinely have to weigh when dealing with potentially dangerous situations...
Legal experts said troopers who responded to the single-car crash on the Edens Expressway seemingly would have been within their rights to pat him down to check for weapons, which they did not do despite a request from paramedics, according to a police investigation of the shooting.
But the experts also said it was a tough judgment call, and that it's not easy to determine when a pat-down of a person not under arrest is warranted....
Anderson, who was a passenger in the car, was at times aggressive toward troopers who were dispatched to the crash site, the officers said in their accident reports. One trooper said Anderson, 27, "attempted to push" him away when he tried to check on Anderson's 9-year-old daughter, also a passenger in the car.
Anderson, who lived in Waukegan, was also suspected to be intoxicated. On Monday, the Lake County coroner's office reported that his blood alcohol content was 0.169, about twice the legal limit. Another man who drove the car was charged with DUI and child endangerment, officials said....
The trooper didn't frisk Anderson but did join paramedics in the ambulance, where Anderson calmed down, said Deputy Chief Ray Larson of the Deerfield-Bannockburn Fire Protection District. The trooper exited the ambulance before paramedics took Anderson and his daughter to the hospital for minor injuries.
"We would not have transported someone if we felt it was unsafe," Larson said. "Our crew did not feel there was a threat."
State troopers also had not considered Anderson to be a threat at the crash scene, said Illinois State Police spokeswoman Monique Bond.
"You can't just search or frisk someone without some sort of threat," Bond said. "That would have violated his civil rights."
Bond said it appeared to have been a "highly emotional situation" for Anderson and that the troopers used their best judgment.
"If he's demonstrating overprotective behavior for his child, that's not going to automatically signal to law enforcement that he's concealing a firearm," Bond said. "If his child wasn't there, it may have been a completely different scenario."
Later at the hospital, Anderson's demeanor continued to swing between calmness and belligerence, according to hundreds of pages of documents related to the task force's probe of the shooting.
Eventually, hospital staff members called in officers from Highland Park — not the state troopers who responded to the crash scene — to try to settle Anderson down. They briefly succeeded, but then he became agitated again as medical staff members tried to get him to change into a hospital gown to be examined.
Anderson likely knew the gun would be discovered once he changed into the gown, said Chief Paul Shafer of the Highland Park Police Department. Authorities later said the gun apparently had been reported stolen in Waukegan, where Anderson lived, and that he did not have a firearm owner's card for a concealed-carry license. Anderson also has an extensive criminal record, was out of prison on parole at the time and was wanted in a July hit-and-run, according to court records and police.
In subsequent interviews with Lake County investigators, Highland Park Officers Brian Reif and Kevin Roberts said they feared for their lives and the safety of others after Anderson pulled out the weapon and refused repeated demands to drop it....
