Chequita Adams, 27

Chicago, Illinois
June 27, 2017

Cause of death: Vehicular

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Last updated: almost 4 years ago

Overview

An off-duty Chicago police officer was being pursued by police before being killed in a crash that also claimed the life of a woman early Tuesday morning in the Lawndale neighborhood on the city's West Side.

The officer's identity was not immediately released but the woman was identified as Chequita Adams, 27.

The crash occurred shortly after 1 a.m. in the 4400-block of West Roosevelt Road.

The officer was driving in his personal SUV when he crashed into Adams's vehicle, said Chicago police spokesperson Anthony Guglielmi. He said it appears the cars collided at a high rate of speed.

Both Adams and the officer were pinned into their vehicles which caught fire. They were pronounced dead at the scene.

Surveillance video nearby shows the officer's Jeep being pursued by a police officer with lights engaged prior to the crash. Police said the officer's personal vehicle met the description of a vehicle in a carjacking but it was not and the pursuing officer turned off the lights.

Three days after a fatal police chase on Chicago’s West Side, NBC 5 Investigates has obtained exclusive video that raises new questions about the Chicago Police Department’s account of the pursuit that led up to the deadly crash.

The chase began just after 1 a.m. on Tuesday, when the pursuing officers–-a gang team out of Area Central--say they spotted a black Jeep that matched the description of a vehicle that had previously been used in a carjacking. Actually, it was a nearly identical Jeep, driven by another Chicago police officer who’d just left work.

Police say that when the officers tried to stop the Jeep at the intersection of Roosevelt Road and Independence Boulevard, the driver fled–-with the officers in pursuit--racing west down Roosevelt Road for twelve blocks, at the rate of about a block every second. At the intersection of Roosevelt and Kostner, the off-duty officer crashed into another car, killing both himself and the driver of the other car, 27-year-old Chequita Adams.

NBC 5 Investigates filed an open-records request with the Chicago Department of Transportation, which keeps red-light- and speed-camera video files. In response, CDOT released several video files which show the chase in progress, as well as two video files from a red-light camera at Roosevelt and Kostner, which show both the violent crash and its aftermath.

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