(Reuters) – Protesters planned to gather on Thursday in Waukegan, Illinois, to bring attention to a police shooting that killed a Black man and wounded his girlfriend, a local Black Lives Matter organizer said.
The protesters will be demanding answers about why a police officer shot 19-year-old Marcellis Stinnette and his girlfriend Tafarra Williams during a traffic stop late on Tuesday night.
Clyde McLemore said he was expecting a few hundred people to gather at the site of the shooting around 12:00 p.m. CDT (1700 GMT) and march to the police station in Waukegan, a city in Lake County about 45 miles (72 km) north of Chicago.
“We are looking at least two to three hundred,” McLemore, founder of the Lake County chapter of Black Lives Matter, told Reuters. “We have people coming from everywhere.”
According to a Waukegan Police Department statement, a white male officer approached a car occupied by two people just before midnight on Tuesday and the car fled.
When a second officer approached the vehicle moments later, the car went into reverse, according to the statement, which identifies the second officer as a Hispanic male.
No firearm was found in the vehicle, the statement says.
“Officer #2 fired his semi-automatic pistol, in fear for his safety,” the statement says, identifying the driver as a Black female in her 20s and the passenger as a Black male in his teens. “The driver and passenger were both struck by gunfire.”
McLemore confirmed their names.
The Waukegan Police Department said it has asked the Illinois State Police to investigate the shooting. The state police declined to comment.
McLemore said he wants the police officers involved to be prosecuted and called on the Department of Justice to step in and investigate the shooting, rather than the state police.
“We are tired of the police investigating the police.”
(Reporting by Nathan Layne in Wilton, Connecticut; editing by Jonathan Oatis)
