Hanrahan Versus Panthers

When I got back to the office there was a message from Skip that said he was still at Fred’s apartment and was working with Mike Gray, who was filming the scene and recording Skip’s gathering of bullets and shell casings. Apparently the police had not sealed off Fred’s apartment—a striking departure from police rules. The police had a duty to protect a crime scene where people were shot and killed. I wondered if they’d abandoned the premises because, having accomplished their dirty work, they did not want to face the community’s response. I was amazed that Skip had the presence of mind, after hearing that Fred had been killed, to call Mike Gray and bring him to the apartment to film evidence collection.

“Hanrahan’s about to hold a press conference!” someone yelled from the next cubicle. Everyone ran next door to Glascott’s Groggery and I asked the bartender to turn the TV on.

Edward Hanrahan was sitting in the library of the State’s Attorney’s Office behind a dark mahogany table covered with rifles, shotguns, handguns, and many hundreds of rounds of ammunition, all arranged in neat rows. He began reading from a sheet of paper in an authoritarian, indignant voice.

As soon as Sergeant Daniel Groth and Officer James Davis, who were leading our men, announced they were policemen, occupants of the first-floor apartment attacked them with shotgun fire. The officers took cover, and the occupants continued firing at our policemen from several rooms in the apartment. Three times after that Sergeant Groth ordered all his men to cease firing and told the occupants to come out with their hands up. Each time one of the occupants replied, “Shoot it out,” and the police officers continued firing at the occupants. The immediate, violent criminal reaction of the occupants in shooting at announced police officers emphasizes the extreme viciousness of the Black Panther Party. So does their refusal to cease firing at the police officers when urged to do so several times. We wholeheartedly commend the police officers for their bravery, their remarkable restraint, and their discipline in the face of the Black Panther attack, as should every decent citizen in our community.

While speaking, Hanrahan frequently pointed to the weapons in front of him, indicating the police had seized them from the Panther apartment. Police procedures required that contraband confiscated be inventoried and taken directly to the crime lab. This was the only way to maintain the chain of custody as well as to preserve the condition of any evidence that had to be tested. Hanrahan bypassed that procedure so he could display the weapons to the press. He appeared confident that if he could show weapons seized from Panthers and remind the public of the Panthers’ “extreme viciousness,” then “every decent citizen” would support the police actions without challenge.

Hanrahan was not only taking responsibility for the raid but also praising the raiders for their courage. Hanrahan’s statement that each time after the police officers called for a cease-fire the occupants answered with shouts of “shoot it out,” sounded more like the lingo in a TV Western than what a Panther, or anyone, would yell in the middle of a gun battle.

In answers to reporters’ questions, Hanrahan said Fred Hampton was found dead in a back bedroom near a .45-caliber handgun. He indicated a similar handgun had been seen firing from that room at the police in the rear. He stopped and pointed to a .45-caliber pistol on the table, indicating this was Hampton’s weapon.

Sergeant Daniel Groth, the apparent leader of the raid, also spoke: “There must have been six or seven of them firing. The firing must have gone on ten or twelve minutes. If two hundred shots were exchanged, that was nothing.” The tall deep-voiced sergeant acted as though he had miraculously escaped an ambush.

When I went back to my office, I called the news desk at the Chicago Daily News, the more widely circulated and liberal of Chicago’s afternoon papers. I told the person who answered they should send a reporter to Hampton’s apartment and that Bobby Rush, the Panther defense minister was holding a press conference there shortly. I also told them Hanrahan had originally denied me access to talk to the Panther survivors, because he did not want his version to be challenged.

Of course I didn’t know for sure exactly what did happen during the raid, only what the Panthers had told me. But there was a spontaneity and consistency to what they said. I thought they would have been proud to defend Fred’s apartment and told me if they had. Their admissions of being caught unprepared, even frightened, and putting up no resistance had the ring of truth.

Later that afternoon I bought the Chicago Daily News, which carried two very different versions of the raid. Under the front-page banner headlines, “Panther Chief, Aide Killed in Gun Battle with Police,” there were two subheads. One was titled “Six Injured in Shootout.” The other was “Police ‘Murdered’ Hampton—Panther, We Can Prove It.”

The first one repeated much of Hanrahan’s press statement and added that he was going to charge all the surviving occupants with attempted murder of the police. An additional statement from Sergeant Groth was included: “As we entered, a girl who was lying on a bed in the living room fired a blast from a shotgun at us,” and “a .45-caliber pistol was found in Hampton’s hand, when officers entered a rear bedroom and found him lying in a pool of blood on a bed. A shotgun was found next to the bed.” Two other raiders, Detectives Carmody and Ciszewski had synchronized their stories with Groth. They told the Daily News reporters that “a man later identified as Hampton had fired at them with a shotgun and a pistol from the rear bedroom.” Deputy Police Superintendent Nygren supported Groth’s account: “Miss Harris touched off the gun battle by firing at the police with a shotgun.”

The other version in the Daily News was based on information I had provided Rush from my interviews with the survivors:

Bobby Rush, deputy minister of defense for the Black Panther Party said Thursday that Panther chairman Fred Hampton was “murdered while he slept in bed.” “We can prove that,” Rush said at a press conference on the steps outside the blood-spattered first floor apartment at 2337 W. Monroe, the scene of Thursday’s Panther police shootout. “This vicious murder of Chairman Fred and Mark Clark, our defense minister from Peoria, was implemented by that dog Nixon and Hanrahan and all the rest of the pigs. Hampton never fired back when the pigs came into his back room and shot Fred in the head. He couldn’t have fired because he was asleep.”

The Daily News article stated that Rush took reporters on a tour of the apartment and “showed them bullet holes that he said indicated that policemen had fired into rooms, but no shots had been fired out.”

A growing chorus in the black community rejected the raiders’ accounts. It was clear to anyone viewing the ravaged apartment that Fred was shot to death on his bed. By late Thursday the Panthers were leading tours for the press, neighborhood residents, and interested civic leaders, pointing out the locations of the bullet holes as well as the bloody mattress. Observers demanded an independent investigation. One organization that immediately challenged Hanrahan was the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League, the black police union that regularly spoke out against police brutality. Their leader, Renault Robinson, went to 2337 West Monroe, and held a press conference the night of the raid. He declared unequivocally that Fred had been “murdered.”