alot more in the article. pretty damning evidence.
LINK /

Thirteen years ago, William Stewart Boyd, a Cook County judge, drove to a South Side church to turn in a handgun his late father had owned.

The Chicago Police Department was accepting guns as part of a buyback program meant to take weapons off the streets and help make the city safer.

Boyd, who hears domestic relations cases, brought them his father’s .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, serial number J515268. He remembers handing it to plainclothes officers who wore their badges and service weapons on their belts. Under the buyback program, they, in turn, gave him a prepaid Visa card. It was for less than $100.

The police recover thousands of guns every year, many of them through buyback programs like this, as well as by confiscating weapons seized during arrests — more than 5,000 guns so far this year alone.

The guns are supposed to be destroyed. But the gun Judge Boyd took in somehow wasn’t. Instead, it turned up eight years later next to the body of a young man who was shot to death by a Cicero police officer.

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The cop — Officer Donald Garrity, who, records show, had a history of discipline problems — is now out of the suburban department and collecting a disability pension as a result of post-traumatic stress he blames on the shooting.

How did a gun Chicago cops were supposed to have kept in a locked custody room and then destroyed end up all of those years later at the scene of a police shooting in Cicero, on a patch of pavement next to the body of a 22-year-old Latin Counts gang member named Cesar A. Munive?

That’s something that Boyd, a judge for nearly 20 years, would like to know.

“I’m doing the right thing,” he says, “and, in the process, someone didn’t do what they were supposed to do. That calls into question the process. What’s happening after you turn these weapons in?”

Police departments in Harvey, Elmwood Park and Dolton all have had guns vanish in recent years. And long before Boyd’s gun disappeared, a city audit found that the Chicago Police Department lost track of more than 130 guns that were stored at an evidence warehouse in the 1990s. Four of those later were seized during arrests.

Now, the Chicago department has opened an internal affairs investigation into how the judge’s revolver ended up in Cicero — something police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi calls “extremely abnormal and troublesome.”

After being informed by a reporter where the gun ended up, Guglielmi says: “We are opening an internal affairs investigation today to trace this gun, verify that it was taken into police custody during a turn-in and investigate how it possibly ended up back on the street.”

Whatever happened to keep the gun from being destroyed, Munive’s family members believe they know how it ended up next to his body. It was planted there by Cicero police to cover up an unjustified shooting by a cop of an unarmed man, according to a civil rights lawsuit the family filed in federal court.

Now, after five years of litigation, Cicero officials are poised to pay the family $3.5 million to settle their case. The Cicero Town Council agreed earlier this month to approve the settlement and is expected to take a final vote soon.