Thread by @TylerLaRiviere

It's nearly been 4 years in the making since I first covered the #LaquanMcDonald outcry and subsequent #JasonVanDykeTrial in Chicago. (Thread)

The first time I was out was the second day of the initial protest in December of 2015. At the time I was shooting for the student newspaper The Herald for @HW_College.

Then later that month activists came out and shut down the magnificent mile during the hight of Christmas shopping.

I worked for the Chicagoist throughout 2016 and even though most would only remember it as an election year, activists rallied and asked the question did black lives really matter, because even though Jason Van Dyke was going through pretrial the names would just keep growing.

As a small aside I also got the great opportunity of going to a @VicMensa concert for Chicagoist and his #16shots song which helped keep Laquan McDonald in the public light as Chicago would brace for the election year.

Finally towards the end of 2016 activists would schedule a protest in front of CPD headquarters to talk about Laquan McDonald as well as the 600+ murders that had happened up until that point in Chicago.

Unfortunately, my 2017 would be centered completely around Trump and the protests that went on afterward throughout Chicago. At the time I and many others mistakenly thought that Chicagoans had either forgotten Laquan McDonald or let their rage dull.

Later in 2017, I would lose my job with Chicagoist and get a new job @Suntimes in 2018 where I would focus on the crime beat, however towards the later parts of the #JasonVanDykeTrial I was given the opportunity of a lifetime to finish a story that I had started years ago.

Is this the end of the Jason Van Dyke and Laquan McDonald saga? More in likely not, sentencing is set sometime at the end of the month. But as a visual journalist, it's not every day you get to see something to an end, you get tied up with another story or something like that.