A convicted armed robber testified Tuesday that a former Chicago police officer removed all but one bullet from his revolver, pointed it at his forehead and fired three times as he tried to get him to confess to a 1985 stickup.
A convicted armed robber testified Tuesday that a former Chicago police officer removed all but one bullet from his revolver, pointed it at his forehead and fired three times as he tried to get him to confess to a 1985 stickup.
Shadeed Mu’min, 66, was the last of five alleged victims to testify that former Lt. Jon Burge and the men under his command shocked, suffocated and abused them. Burge has pleaded not guilty to federal perjury and obstruction of justice charges. He’s accused of lying in a civil lawsuit when he denied seeing or participating in the torture of suspects.
More than 100 victims say the torture started in the 1970s and persisted until the ‘90s at police stations on the city’s south and west sides.
Mu’min said he was sitting across from Burge in his office in October 1985 when Burge pulled out what appeared to be a .44 Magnum and laid it on the desk.
“He took all the bullets out except one,” Mu’min said. “He placed it to my head. … He spinned the cylinder and clicked three times.”
When Mu’min continued to deny involvement in the robbery, an angry Burge “rushed me from behind the desk with a typewriter cover” and tried to put it over his head, Mu’min said. Burge held the cover over his nose and mouth three separate times, twice until he lost consciousness, he said. When he began to struggle, he said an “associate” of Burge who’d been watching from the doorway came in and held him down, and one of them said, “It’s fun time.”
He didn’t name the associate, but former police detective Michael McDermott testified about Mu’min the day before, giving a much less explosive account of what he saw happen.
McDermott testified that he saw Burge briefly point his gun toward Mu’min, not at him, from a distance of 10 to 12 feet. That contradicted McDermott’s 2008 testimony before a grand jury in which he said he’d seen Burge point his gun at Mu’min. He’s maintained that he never saw Burge handle the gun’s bullets.
Mu’min has convictions for armed robbery in Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana. He currently lives in Ohio.
Copyright 2010 Associated Press.
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