Video: Man Confronts Macon County Illinois Sheriff's Deputies with Police Shotgun after Stealing Cruiser

By Tony Reid

Source Herald & Review, Decatur, Ill.

MACON, IL — Dramatic cop body cam video shows gunman Oscar M. McCurry II refusing to drop a stolen police shotgun before being shot and wounded by officers forced to defend themselves.

And yet the video, released by the State Police late Thursday afternoon, also shows that the wounded McCurry still wouldn’t give up.

He had dropped the shotgun but was still armed with a knife as he confronted police on U.S. 51 outside of Macon and kept screaming “Kill me, kill me, I’ve got to die” while surrounding officers shouted back at him over and over to “get on the ground, get on the ground.”

The 38-year-old Macon man was finally taken into custody without further bloodshed to end the confrontation which happened on the morning of May 3 near the P&V Quickstop gas station.

McCurry appeared Thursday in Macon County Circuit Court for a pretrial hearing and is denying charges of the aggravated unlawful possession of a weapon and aggravated battery of a peace officer among several other felony counts.

A sworn affidavit said McCurry had commandeered a squad car during the confrontation and used it ram another squad car driven by an officer who is heard yelling out in pain on his body cam video after he was hit. The shotgun wielded by McCurry had been broken out of its secure case in the commandeered vehicle.

Presiding Judge Thomas Griffith has now ordered a psychiatric evaluation of McCurry as his defense lawyer, Susan Moorehead, plans to seek grounds for an insanity defense. The judge ruled there was “good cause for the appointment of an expert” and McCurry remains held in the Macon County Jail.

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Oscar McCurry was shot and wounded after police say he hijacked a squad car and menaced officers with a shotgun and a machete.

Commenting on the just released videos, Macon County Sheriff Jim Root said they show the public the kind of scenarios police officers have to deal with. “I’m not saying that they are all this extreme, but we handle these types of events, with mental health issues, on a regular basis,” he told the Herald & Review.

“Unfortunately, this one got a little bit far out of the scope of what we wanted. We wanted it to be contained, so we could deal with it, but some circumstances didn't go the way we wanted them to and it went down another path that we still had to deal with.”

A sworn affidavit about the incident said it had started with McCurry using his vehicle to ram a semi-truck outside the gas station. He was armed with a large knife and, as police worked to divert busy passing traffic to keep the public safe, the affidavit said McCurry jumped into an empty squad car and sped away.

He then went north in the southbound lane of U.S. 51, forcing an approaching squad car into a ditch before ramming the other squad car. He then got out armed with the shotgun and was shot and wounded; all of the drama is captured from various perspectives on the released body and squad car videos.

Macon County State Attorney Diane Couri announced May 30 that there will no charges filed against any of the officers involved in the wake of the incident.

Root said his deputies try to have compassion for disturbed people who are having “the worst day of their life” and he says the videos show officers desperately trying to get McCurry to surrender peacefully.

“They showed a lot of restraint to try to have a non-violent resolution,” he added. “But sometimes we can’t control the actions of people that we’re dealing with.”

One aspect to come out of all this that the sheriff said will be helpful in the future is analyzing what happened and using it as lessons learned for training purposes.

“We say ‘Hey, what can we do better?’” Root said. “I’m not saying that we did anything wrong, and hindsight is always 20-20. But whenever we are faced with these types of events, we look to see if maybe we would have done this or that, then maybe it would have come out differently.”

Police incident videos are often released much earlier than this, and the sheriff said that was not his decision but had been in the hands of the State Police.

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