Assistant state’s attorney Fabio Valentini said he never informed the South Side man a Chicago Police officer was hit in the June 1, 2009 shooting.
But Valentini said Gaston casually told him he shot four rounds in the direction where the plain-clothed Englewood district officer had been standing in the 6000 block of South Hermitage.
Valadez, 27, died hours after the bullets pierced his thigh and left ear.
“I did the shooting,” Gaston said matter-of-factly in a 15-minute videotaped statement assistant state’s attorney Jeffrey Allen presented to the jury hearing the case against Gaston in Judge Jorge Alonso’s courtroom.
Gaston said he and his best friend Kevin Walker had just finished getting matching tattoos from a “big fat white dude” when the gray Pontiac G6 they were traveling in was shot at ten times.
Gaston retrieved a 9mm weapon he hid in a neighbor’s back porch and told Walker they were “fitting to go right back” and avenge their attack, Gaston said on videotape.
He then directed Walker to drive back to the South Hermitage address.
“I told him [Walker] to slow down. I’d seen people standing right there, and I shot them,” Gaston, 22, said on camera.
“Right there,” according to prosecutors, was where Valadez had been talking to Englewood resident Kelvin Thomas while following up on the shots fired that had irked Gaston just five minutes earlier.
Gaston said he and some “n------” on Hermitage had been fighting for a while but told Valentini and a detective it wasn’t a gang-related dispute.
Gaston had confessed hours before he agreed to be videotaped and used his right hand to make a shooting motion, said Valentini, chief of the State’s Attorney’s Office Criminal Bureau.
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