The Chicago police officer who fatally shot his partner in the back and has since been stripped of his police powers after he later was accused of attacking a female police officer at a Wicker Park bar has offered his version of what happened at the bar — saying he’s the victim, harassed by two women over the fatal shooting and called “a murderer.”
Officer Carlos Baker told officers he was at a birthday party Aug. 10 at DSTRKT Bar & Grill, 1540 N. Milwaukee Ave., where he was harassed by the women over the fatal shooting of Officer Krystal Rivera.
Baker told officers that a woman at the bar was recording him on her cellphone, holding it up to his face and refusing to stop, so he asked “bar staff and friends” to escort her out.
He told police he thought he “was being harassed due to being recognized from his involvement in a high-profile police-involved shooting,” apparently referring to Baker’s fatal shooting of Rivera, his partner, after the officers chased a suspect into a Chatham apartment on June 5.
When Baker’s friends came back inside and told him the woman was a police officer, he said he went outside to get her name and badge number and was “suddenly approached” by another woman, his girlfriend’s mother, who punched him in the left eye as his girlfriend stood nearby, according to the police report.
He said his girlfriend’s mother told her daughter words to the effect of: “You’re really going to be with him? He’s a murderer,” according to the police report.
Baker had no visible injuries, police said, declined to be taken to the hospital and refused to press charges against his girlfriend’s mother.
The off-duty police officer who had recorded Baker filed her own police report, saying Baker and a woman had punched her repeatedly while in the bar’s vestibule after they pressured her to delete the videos. She was taken to Rush University Medical Center and got two stitches to repair a split lip, according to police sources.
Baker’s attorney, who previously has denied that the officer was involved in a bar fight, did not return messages Monday seeking comment.
Baker made the police report at his Little Italy home after first contacting his boss, Gresham District Cmdr. Michael Tate.
A spokeswoman for the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability, which is investigating the shooting and the bar altercation, said, “We are investigating this matter and cannot comment further on pending investigations.”
Meanwhile, the police department’s internal affairs bureau is investigating an accusation that Baker tried to get video of the altercation from a nearby business and that he said he was investigating the matter despite being on a leave of absence since the shooting.
Baker has racked up disciplinary complaints in his short career as an officer, the Illinois Answers Project and Chicago Sun-Times have reported. After he fatally shot Rivera — the first shooting in nearly 40 years in which a Chicago cop has killed another officer — he was stripped of his policing powers, though as a result of the alleged bar attack.
Police officials and Baker’s union attorney have called the shooting an accident, but Rivera’s family has called for an independent investigation of the shooting and the release of police body-camera footage from that night.
Separately, an Illinois Answers Project and Sun-Times investigation found that Rivera had been a key witness to the theft of a Glock handgun that was turned over to police at a gun-buyback event in December 2023 and then disappeared from a room full of cops at the Gresham District station on the South Side.
Rivera told police internal affairs investigators she tried to find the gun in her colleagues’ book bags once she realized it was missing. The gun ended up being used in a series of shootings and later was found in the possession of a teenage boy.
Peter Nickeas and Casey Toner report for the Illinois Answers Project. Tom Schuba is a Sun-Times editor and reporter.
