The mother of slain Chicago Police Officer Ella French stood in a packed courtroom Wednesday and recalled looking through photos of her daughter.
In one, Ella is a toddler covered in food. In another, she wears a white confirmation dress. Finally, there is the graduation photo of a young woman “standing proud and tall in her blue police uniform.”
“The memories, they sneak up on you sometimes,” Elizabeth French told Judge Ursula Walowski at the emotional sentencing hearing for the man convicted of killing her daughter.
When that happens, she continued, “There is a knot in my stomach, my heart is squished and tears run down my face.”
She turned to face Emonte Morgan and spoke directly to the man who was convicted of French’s murder last March.
“With our choices come consequences,” she said.
Her words were later echoed by Walowski as she sentenced Morgan to life in prison for French’s murder and the attempted murder of her partner, Carlos Yanez, who was shot and seriously wounded during a traffic stop three years ago.
“You made those decisions, you pulled that trigger,” Walowski said.
The judge added 50 years for the attempted murder of another officer, Joshua Blas, and seven years for being a felon possessing a weapon that night.
Morgan was defiant as he addressed the judge before the sentencing. He questioned the legality of the police stop that led to the shooting and said he believed “the truth would come out.”
“Ella French was not murdered, she had an accidental death.” he told the judge, a reference to his defense that the gun discharged during a struggle as he was being taken into custody. “We deserve justice. We are not monsters at all.”
The same sentiments were voiced by Morgan’s mother, Evalena Flores, who has steadfastly stood by her son and insisted on his innocence.
The tense hearing briefly erupted into shouts when Yanez’s father took the stand. He called Morgan “a f———a——” who “should have been put down long ago.”
Flores reacted immediately, shouting back and accusing Officer Yanez of “causing all this.”
Sheriff’s deputies removed Flores from the courtroom as she continued to shout, leading Officer Yanez to yell, “F—- you, b—-. F—- you.”
Flores was allowed back into the courtroom shortly afterward.
After the hearing ended, Flores gave a statement to reporters railing against police corruption and unlawful traffic stops, predicting her son would one day be vindicated.
She complained about the prosecutors, her son’s public defenders, the judge, the jury but refused to acknowledge any responsibility by her son.
She was flanked by a member of the Chicago Torture Justice Center, who compared Morgan’s case to several of the city’s most significant wrongful conviction cases in recent years.
Kim Foxx, who as state’s attorney has championed exonerations for people wrongfully imprisoned and has overseen hundreds of cases overturned over police misconduct allegations, said Morgan’s case didn’t compare with those.
Foxx told reporters she was sympathetic to “whatever reality” Flores had to create to process the consequences for her son but added, “I don’t think this is a sentence that anyone, outside of Mr. Morgan’s mother, would question as a just sentence.”
Officers French, Yanez and Blas were on patrol just after 9 p.m. on Aug. 7, 2021, when their computer notified them that a Honda CRV they were following had an expired registration.
The officers approached the car and ordered the three occupants out after Yanez spotted an open bottle of alcohol on the floor where Morgan was sitting.
As the officers talked to the occupants, Morgan could be seen on police body camera video holding his cellphone, arguing and declining to put it down despite repeated requests from Yanez.
As Yanez went to take one of his arms, Morgan pushed away and moved toward the opposite side of the car. At the same time, his brother Eric Morgan, who had been driving, took off running.
Blas followed in pursuit, leaving Yanez struggling with Emonte Morgan in the front passenger side of the Honda.
As French rounded the back of the car to help her partner, Emonte Morgan fired a .22-caliber Glock he had concealed. Jurors watched body camera footage of the shooting — including from French’s camera — hearing her scream and then watching her fall to the ground.
Morgan then turned the gun on Yanez, firing several more times before stepping over the officers’ bodies and fleeing. Blas, who heard the shots, returned and confronted Morgan and exchanged gunfire.
Despite being wounded by Blas, Morgan ran away as Blas attended to his partners and made desperate radio calls for help.
Both brothers were taken into custody a short distance away, with Eric Morgan in possession of the gun used in the shooting, prosecutors said at trial.
Picked up and placed in a squad car by responding officers, French was rushed to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
The young officer was lauded as a hero and held up by city officials as a shining example of what a Chicago police officer should be.
In a botched police raid on the home of Anjanette Young, for which the police department received harsh criticism, Young singled out French who she said was the only officer who showed her “dignity or respect.”
Arriving after the raid began and finding Young unclothed and repeatedly questioning why she was being handcuffed, French removed the handcuffs from Young and took her to a bedroom to get dressed.
Yanez survived but suffered serious injuries, including the loss of his right eye.
Officer Carlos Yanez speaks with reporters Wednesday after the sentencing of Emonte Morgan at the Leighton Criminal Courthouse. Morgan was sentenced to life in prison for shooting and killing Yanez’s partner, Chicago Police Officer Ella French during a traffic stop in 2021.
Anthony Vazquez/Sun-Times
At Emonte Morgan’s trial, he told jurors about his intensive efforts in therapy to be able to walk again and pointed to a lump in his neck that he said was a bullet that doctors believed was too dangerous to remove.
“I may not have succumbed to my injuries, but I was shot four times in the head. … I will never be the man that I was,” Yanez said in his statement, later adding in a comment directed at Morgan, “But I will never stop fighting.”
Emonte’s brother, Eric Morgan, 26, pleaded guilty last fall to aggravated unlawful use of a weapon, battery with a deadly weapon and obstruction of justice. He was sentenced by Walowski to seven years in prison.
State records show he is serving his sentence at Pinckneyville Correctional Center with an expected parole date in June 2026.
The third passenger in the car, a young woman who was dating Eric Morgan at the time, was not charged and testified against Emonte Morgan at trial.