Previously, on Somebody...

WGN: There are still so many unanswered questions about what led to the death of 22-year-old Courtney Copeland.

NBC: Family members say Copeland was on his way to a friend’s house when he was shot through his car window. A bullet hit his back.

CBS: He managed to flag down a police car in front of the 25th district station and was rushed to a hospital. The wound was fatal.

SHAPEARL: I believe that not enough has been done to solve Courtney’s murder.

POLICE: What would you like done that I haven’t done?

SHAPEARL: I personally would’ve went back and re-interviewed everybody?

POLICE: Re-interviewed the police?

SHAPEARL: Oh, absolutely

SHAPEARL: Whoever did this to my son…I ask that you turn yourself in. I ask that you ask for forgiveness from God.

My name is Shapearl Wells. This is the story of my son Courtney, a young black man in a fancy car, who wound up with a bullet in his back in front of a Chicago police station. 

And it’s the story of my search for the truth.

THEME: “Everybody’s Something” by Chance the Rapper

This is Somebody.

MLK: And so every black person in this country must rise up and say, “I am somebody. I have a rich proud and noble history, however painful and exploited it has been.”

Black people have always had to say it out loud: I am somebody. Because the people in charge keep telling us we’re not.

MLK: I am black but I am black and beautiful.

This is something Dr. Martin Luther King used to say in front of crowds. And Reverend Jesse Jackson has carried on the tradition.

JESSE JACKSON: I am Somebody! I am Somebody!

When I hear Reverend Jackson saying that, when he tells you that you are somebody. He reminds you to think about your own self-worth and even though the world around you is telling you that you are nothing, you are somebody.  

CHANT: We want justice! We want justice! We want justice!

And my son Courtney, he was somebody. I felt that I had the responsibility to force the police to take a look at his case and say, “Hey, this kid is somebody.”

SANTITA: Hey everybody, welcome back to “Keep Hope Alive” with Reverend Jesse Jackson. I’m Santita Jackson. We want you to call us at...

That’s Santita Jackson. She co-hosts the radio show “Keep Hope Alive” with her father, Reverend Jesse Jackson.

Here in Chicago, their show airs on WVON. The “Voice of the Nation.” But it used to be called the “Voice of the Negro” The station was a catalyst in getting out the  message of the civil right movement.

SANTITA: And now they’re mainstream...Let me go to Shapearl, from Chicago. Shapearl, what’s on your mind? 

I’ve been a frequent caller for years. I’m always on their Facebook page. 

SANTITA: ...Shapearl, I’m so glad you came off of that Facebook page, Shapearl. What’s on your mind today?

SHAPEARL: Thank you so much for taking my call, Santita. Good morning to your panel. I want to actually reiterate what Dr. Roberts said.

SANTITA: You were one of my best callers. Someone who was very confrontational in a respectful way, very informed, and very determined to get the story right. 

The thing about Santita, she knows so many people. She’s connected. So after Courtney was killed, she was one of the first people I called.      

SANTITA: It was 2, 3 in the morning, something like that. I immediately became alarmed because anyone who calls me at that hour, it's typically not good news. You were in between crying and talking. And you just kept saying, “This is my son. This is my baby.” You just kept saying, “Courtney, my baby, my baby. Santita, he's been killed.”

I told her the detectives wouldn’t tell me much of anything but they wanted to ask me a bunch of questions. 

SANTITA: I told you to stop. You need to record, that is, write down, everything that you heard and saw and felt, because you will lose it as we go, as time goes on.

Santita’s advice? To write everything down? That was the best advice I could have been given.

SANTITA: …In the beginning you get the truth. Cover up happens after the first day or so but, in the beginning, you get the truth.

I went straight into investigator mode. I wrote up a timeline. And I made a voice recording on my phone to keep track of all the details. 

I told that recorder everything I was thinking…About the night I got the news.

SHAPEARL: So...approximately around 2:15 am, I receive a thunderous beat on my door.

I told that recorder about my conversations with detectives.

SHAPEARL: I began to question through my pain, can I talk to the officer? I need to know exactly what my son said to him. And they said, that that's the only thing that he had said, that he had been shot.

I also told that recorder about what I really believe happened to Courtney.

SHAPEARL:  I believe my son was stopped, and pulled out his vehicle because they ran the plates and they saw a young Black man driving in a Hispanic area, with a car that was not registered in a Black person's name.

Courtney had a co-signer on that BMW: his friend Christian Hernandez. It was his name on the car registration, and not Courtney’s. 

POLICE : 2522 Robert..

DISPATCH: 22 Robert. Go ahead.

Which the police would have known…

POLICE \: Edward 5-5-1-7-9-0.

DISPATCH: 10-4.

...they ran his plates.

And...Christian told me that police called him right after Courtney died...to ask who the real owner of the car was.

And another thing. We knew the police had Courtney’s name.

POLICE: Victim is a male, his name is Courtney. Copeland. 

And so, they would have learned that Courtney had an I-R number. That’s a number that’s assigned to you when you’re arrested.

Let me give you a little backstory. 

When Courtney was about 17, he and some friends found a debit card at school. And they used it to buy some Harold’s Chicken. And I get this phone call, and it’s my mom and she’s like, “Courtney’s in jail.” I’m like, “Who? What Courtney? Who you talking about?” So I immediately told her, “Well, I don’t care what he did. Leave him there.”

I remember being so mad at him.

Courtney was punished with an in-school suspension. The case was tossed. He never got arrested again. But that I-R number followed him.

No matter that he was just a kid. And all that he and his friends did was steal some chicken.

A week after Courtney died, me, my husband Brent and my mom Renee we met with police. The station was old and dilapidated. 

POLICE: Let me grab the other detectives.

Brent recorded the whole thing on his phone, from his pocket. 

SHAPEARL: [ringtone] Hello? Hi. How are you?

While we waited, I was taking calls and planning Courtney’s funeral.

SHAPEARL: Uh the wake is at 1 and then the actual services is gonna start at 3. So it's a two-hour visitation and then the program is gonna start at...

POLICE: Hi, folks, I'm Scott Fuller. I’ll be sitting in on the meeting. Can I get anybody some soft drinks, water, chips anything at all? 

BRENT: Just water. 

POLICE: Two waters? 

RENEE: Make it three.

POLICE: Three waters? 

SHAPEARL: Yeah, Monday is the burial. No, no, no, it's at 10. Hold on one second, Christian, hold on.

The three of us sat across from the three of them.

SHAPEARL: I just wanted know who I'm speaking with. Fuller, and what was your name?

POLICE: Sgt. Mitchell.

SHAPEARL: Sgt. Mitchell. So you’re the big wig, huh?

POLICE: No...no, no, no...Believe me...

I wrote down their names.

POLICE: First of all you have our condolences. Um, everybody we've spoken to, your son was a great kid. Um, and nobody's had a bad word to say about him.

They told us they’d do everything they could to find out who killed Courtney.

POLICE: ...person who did this, or persons, to justice...Ok, we, myself and the detectives, you couldn't have two better guys working the case. Ok? Um, you know there's, you know there's, sometimes people are out in that game, they're playing out there, and you know things happen. This is not the case here. Um, and, like I said, we're..., it provides us with an extra incentive. You know, we're kind of of the belief that homicide is, you know, it's almost biblical. It's like the worst thing you can do to somebody. 

They asked if we had any questions. My mom, Brent and I...we had a lot.

POLICE: Ok, so fire away.

SHAPEARL: Ok, the first question I had was: Who was the officer on the scene that assisted my son?

POLICE: There were several officers on the scene and um they did assist, they attempted to, they were comforting to your son. Um we know that for a fact. Um.

RENEE: May we have the names of the officers?

POLICE: Um. No I'm not going to... not right now. Ok. Let us..

RENEE: I'm the grandmother by the way. 

POLICE: Ok. Um. No we're not going to give out names of officers on this, but I can ensure you that they summoned help right away. They comforted your son. They did all that they could to help him. Um. You know uh, it, you know you see and you hear a lot of things, but I'm actually really proud of the way the officers conducted themselves, you know...

But, when I started to press them, it was clear they hadn’t even talked to the officers on the scene.

SHAPEARL: So when my son approached the cops, what did he say?

POLICE: From what I understand, he related to the officer he'd been shot. Um, they called 911, they got on the radio and summoned an ambulance. 

SHAPEARL: He didn't tell them anything, he didn't elaborate like who shot him or where this occurred? Cause I know my son, and that's just like hard to believe.

POLICE: We are going to speak with all the officers that were on the scene.

SHAPEARL: So you haven't done it?

POLICE: No, the detectives, you see this happened over the midnight shift and midnights assigns detectives to do the scene and they speak with the officers that were there…

I asked them about the cameras right outside the station. The ones that would have shown what happened when my son pulled up. 

SHAPEARL: So you’re talking about the police station cameras?

POLICE: The police station.

SHAPEARL: Those cameras don’t work?

They said they didn’t work.

POLICE: Those cameras do not work.

RENEE: That's crazy.

POLICE: Let me tell you something. I arrived as a young policeman to that station in May of 1987. I went to the 25th District. Those cameras were awful.

POLICE: And I was there in January of ‘91, until we came here four years ago... 

POLICE: Multiple requests over the years by the District Commander to have them repaired.

Right outside the police station, there’s a big park, with three schools. So to tell me those cameras hadn’t worked in decades? That was unacceptable.

POLICE: I do share your frustration when things don't work for us. Cameras don't work. Computers don't work. Automobiles don't work. It is very frustrating but you know what, we have these hurdles in every investigation. You work you overcome....

SHAPEARL: I'm just trying to figure out, how can you solve it? How can you solve, I mean, I mean, I feel like your job is to serve and protect and you can’t do it unless you have the proper equipment.

RENEE: But you can't do it if you don’t have any equipment...

SHAPEARL: ...If you don't have the proper equipment. And that shows me the lack of priority, it is, to save lives in this city. 

But when I talked to the detectives on the phone to set up this meeting, one of them told me that they had already seen a video from the neighborhood camera.

SHAPEARL: Only one worked. And you said that you did find...

POLICE: Well no one said one video. No one ever said that. 

SHAPEARL: Ok, you said you saw him on one camera right? 

POLICE: I said I was able to view one camera at the time we spoke. That's what I said. 

SHAPEARL: Ok, so you have, you do have other videos that you need to watch?

POLICE: I do.

I needed to see what was on those tapes. But they wouldn’t give them to me. They said it was an ongoing investigation.  So I went back home and I pushed in other ways. 

PROTEST: “If the police don’t work, the cameras should.”

I hit the streets…

PROTEST: “If the police don’t work, the cameras should.”

...and I got back on the radio.

THE FEMALE SOLUTION: Women have the power to transform this world. We can end crime and violence if we all agree to do one thing. Share.

SHAPEARL: My theory is that the gangbangers, the police, everybody is a suspect until they rule themselves out. I have to see the video in order to rule them out.

FUNERAL: God is in charge.

Courtney’s homegoing service was at the Cicero Community Center. The funeral home wouldn’t work because Courtney had too many friends. So we had people standing room only.

FUNERAL: ...which is in charge!...

Courtney was everyone’s best friend. He had that gift of making everyone feel important. After he had passed away, everybody was saying, “Oh, he was my best friend, he was my best friend. He was my best friend. He really was my best friend!”

I just loved the stories people told.  Like Courtney’s friend, Jova. 

JOVA: He was like our Will Smith, like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. This kid was just like, he made himself at home. He'll open up the fridge. That was his thing. He was just in there…

 Chance the Rapper showed up too. He stayed in the back.

CHANCE: You know walking in the room and seeing all these familiar faces and all these faces I had never seen before, all broken over my friend….you know, it just hit me...like, he was just a good dude, funny dude, and just like realizing like that somebody had taken him, you know. It was just all hard for me to deal with that shit there.

I put Courtney in a tuxedo. That’s what he’s wearing in his favorite picture. So I told myself, I'm gonna make him look just like that. 

The service, it was so beautiful. And Santita, she sang for him.

SANTITA: No more! No more! Weeping and wailing! No more! No more!

SHAPEARL: You sang the song I think by Mahalia Jackson….

SANTITA: Troubles of the World…

MAHALIA JACKSON: No more weeping and wailing. No more weeping and wailing….

SANTITA: It says, “Soon I will be done with the troubles of the world...” You are supposed to cry at birth and rejoice at death. Cause as excited as we are to see a baby, you don't tell the baby, “Well this is gonna be a tough journey.”

All of his best friends were his pallbearers. They wore red bow ties, black vests and white gloves as they lowered my son’s body into the ground.

With Courtney’s funeral now behind us, I was just left to sit in this new reality. That my baby, he was never coming back.

But, still, I didn’t know the worst of what had happened to Courtney. That news was winding its way across the City of Chicago.

It started at the hospital on the North Side. Someone who worked there said something to a friend. And that friend talked to my Uncle Marvin, who’s on the West Side. And Uncle Marvin called my mom, who’s downtown.

Uncle Marvin told my mom that there was a rumor going around the hospital that Courtney was combative.

RENEE: What they told him about, that he was being combative, we were shocked with that information. We really were.

Police told me he collapsed in front of the station. So when did he all of sudden get uncollapsed and become combative? Plus, when he arrived to the hospital, he was already in cardiac arrest. I asked the hospital to put together Courtney’s medical records so I could see for myself.

Brent and I dropped off our daughter at school and headed straight for the hospital for the paperwork. I started flipping through the medical records before we even left the parking lot. Right away, I found a document. A write-up from the EMTs.

It says my son was “combative”, “violent”, “agitated”, a “danger to others”, and that he was handcuffed. Handcuffed! Police never told me about any handcuffs. And why would they handcuff someone who was dying? Unless they thought he was a suspect of some kind?

Brent was quiet but I could tell he was angry. 

BRENT: I know how he is, and I know he didn’t do anything to pose a threat. Had he been a young white guy, nice car, the situation would have been totally different.

I thought about those detectives we had just met with.

POLICE: You know you see and hear a lot of things. But I'm actually really proud of the way the officers conducted themselves.

They were just playing me for a fool.

POLICE: You know you can take some comfort in that. That he was...there were people there that cared and that they did, you know they did help him.

Brent and I really needed to process all of this. We felt sick to our stomachs, but we knew we had to eat. So we went to one of our favorite restaurants, a place called Sweet Maple’s Cafe. We drove there directly from the hospital. 

Our hearts were on the floor. We couldn’t stop thinking about the police handcuffing our baby.

Right when we walk in the door, lo and behold, there she is. The E-R nurse from the night Courtney died. You know? The one who had held my hand and comforted me. She was sitting with an older woman, her mother.

CLARESSA: I told my mom. “Oh my God!” I was like, “Mom, you remember the story I was telling you about where the young man got killed?” I'm like, “Now, that's his parents right there.”

Claressa Hawkins was working the E.R. when Courtney came in. She was the one who cut the clothes off his body. I had to ask her: “Was my baby really handcuffed?” She told me, “He was.”

CLARESSA: I remember him specifically being handcuffed to the bed. And so we were like, “Ok, where's the police? We need these handcuffs off.” And then maybe like about, I would say about a minute, that the police walked in and they took off the handcuffs.

Nurse Hawkins said that when she first saw Courtney, his right hand was handcuffed to the stretcher. Which was a problem, because they needed to transfer him to a hospital bed so they could work on him. And they couldn’t.

CLARESSA: Yeah, it was different. I don't remember ever seeing any other gunshot victims come in handcuffed.

She didn’t remember ANYTHING about him being combative.

CLARESSA: So, if, if somebody is combative we know that when they coming in, cause that's one of the first things they tell us, for safety. Oh this person’s combative. So be ready. We never got that report about him that he was combative, cause then our security team has to come and we have to have extra security there. And we have to have medications on board to calm this person down.

My baby must have been so scared. He was all by himself. But it’s a comfort to me that Nurse Hawkins showed him some compassion.

CLARESSA: And I remember laying my hands on his arm and I started praying for him like, “Lord, I don't know what happened but please you know save this person's life.” I started praying for him.

She didn’t know anything about Courtney when she prayed for him. Just that he was somebody.

We exchanged numbers and left the restaurant. But the day wasn’t over yet. It wasn’t even noon. Next, we had to go to the tow yard to get Courtney’s car back. We’d been getting the runaround for weeks. The BMW was caught between the police and the impound lot. Just stuck in paperwork. I wanted all of Courtney’s stuff back - the clothes he was wearing, his book bag, his phone. And most of all, I wanted the car, BeBe.

Courtney’s friend -- Christian Hernandez -- the guy who co-signed for it -- had to meet us there to get it released. And the thing that shook us both? Is that there was no blood in the car. But police said Courtney was shot inside the vehicle. It simply didn’t make sense.

We towed the BMW home. A lawyer we found was waiting for us to process the car. Back in our garage, the lawyer and his colleague took hundreds of pictures of the BMW as evidence.  I finally felt like someone was taking my son’s case seriously. They wore gloves and put the items from the car in ziplock bags and labelled them. I stayed inside the house. It was too emotional. 

I’ve gone through those pictures of what they found. There’s lots and lots of broken glass. But besides that, It was like looking into my son’s world. There’s a yellow sticky note taped to his drivers side that says Marketing Director. That’s the job Courtney was working toward. It was his goal. And I promise you, looking at that, it just broke my heart. There was a lighter. A Nutter Butter wrapper. An empty Gatorade bottle. Lemon-lime, his favorite kind. And a parking ticket he was probably hiding from me. There’s one winter glove. No doubt he lost the other one. He was always on the go.

Item after item. Sealed up in those plastic bags.

There was a box for a new iPhone. He just got that phone a week before he was shot. But the phone itself wasn’t there. The police still had it.

A few weeks later, when I got it back, the screen was cracked...and the phone was unlocked.