Killing of Rekia Boyd

Rekia Boyd (November 5, 1989 – March 21, 2012) was a 22-year-old Black American woman fatally shot in Chicago, Illinois, by Dante Servin, an off-duty Chicago police detective who is Hispanic, on March 21, 2012.

According to the Wikipedia account of the case, Servin, while off duty, drove to Douglass Park on Chicago's West Side after calling police to make a noise complaint. He approached a group of four people who had been socializing in the park, and a verbal altercation followed. One of the individuals present, Antonio Cross, later alleged that he believed Servin was looking for a drug dealer and that he told Servin to leave. Servin then fired shots into the group, striking Rekia Boyd in the head and wounding Antonio Cross in the hand. At Servin's 2015 trial, a friend of Boyd's testified that she hid behind a tree as the group ran from the gunfire, that she saw Boyd on the ground injured and dying, and that police at the scene threatened to arrest her if she did not leave rather than allow her to ride in the ambulance with Boyd.

Chicago police initially stated that Servin fired after Cross approached him with a gun; Boyd's family disputed this, saying the object in Cross's hand was a cell phone, and no weapon was ever recovered from the scene.

Boyd's family filed a lawsuit against the city of Chicago on April 5, 2012, which was settled in March 2013. In November 2013, Servin was charged with involuntary manslaughter — the first time in 17 years that an off-duty Chicago police officer in Cook County had faced criminal charges, the previous instance being a 1995 case. Servin requested a bench trial. On April 20, 2015, Judge Dennis J. Porter issued a directed verdict clearing Servin, reasoning that because the shooting was intentional rather than reckless, it could only have supported a first-degree murder charge, not involuntary manslaughter. Double jeopardy protections then barred any subsequent murder charge against Servin.

The ruling prompted sustained public protest. Chicago-based organizing groups, including Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100), Project NIA, and others, held rallies, teach-ins, and a "Black August" event series to keep attention on Boyd's case and support her family, including her brother Martinez Sutton. In November 2015, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and police superintendent Garry McCarthy both called for Servin's firing by the Chicago Police Board, and the city separately paid $4.5 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit brought by Boyd's family. Servin resigned from the police department on May 17, 2016, two days before a scheduled disciplinary hearing on his termination. In November 2019, a judge denied Servin's requests to have the case expunged and later to have its records sealed.

Boyd's death became a reference point within the Black Lives Matter movement's attention to police killings of Black women and girls. An arts organization, A Long Walk Home, is leading a Rekia Boyd Monument Project in partnership with Chicago city agencies, with a monument planned for 2026-27.