Chicago police have reviewed hundreds of hours of surveillance video footage but they found no evidence of 2 suspects who allegedly attacked actor Jussie Smollet early Tuesday.
Investigators say they can confirm the route Smollett took after he left his downtown Chicago hotel to get a bite to eat at a nearby Subway restaurant. The temperature was -10 degrees Fahrenheit.
Police reviewed hundreds of hours of video footage that shows Smollett walking alone to and from the restaurant. But none of the footage shows the alleged attack, a police official told the AP on Wednesday.
A Subway employee told ET News the actor left the restaurant around 2:15 a.m. The Subway is a 4 or 5 minute walk from the Loews Hotel where Smollett was staying.
Smollett, 36, told detectives the two masked suspects recognized him as the singer/songwriter Jamal Lyon on the Fox hip-hop soap opera “Empire”, and they shouted, “Aren’t you that fa**ot” Empire ni**er?”
The actor said the men beat him up, placed a thin rope around his neck and threw bleach in his face during the alleged attack.
Smollett still had the small rope — described as a clothesline, straight out the package – looped around his neck when police arrived at his manager’s apartment 40 minutes later.
Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said he and investigators reviewed video footage from hotels, public buses and businesses along the route Smollet took to the restaurant and back to the apartment.
“We haven’t seen anybody, at this point, matching the description he gave, nobody looks menacing and we didn’t find a container [of bleach] anywhere,” Guglielmi said.
He said the investigation is ongoing. But investigators are skeptical of Smollet’s story because he changed his story after a quote attributed to him began trending on Twitter.com Tuesday.
TMZ claimed the two suspects yelled “This is MAGA country” during the attack. But Chicago police denied TMZ’s story.
Smollett didn’t mention “MAGA country” until after police called him and questioned him a second time – after TMZ published the quote and it went viral on Twitter.com.
Chicago has one of the most expensive and sophisticated video surveillance systems in the US. Cameras are mounted everywhere on poles, buses and outside businesses.
Police are confident the cameras will either confirm or dispute Smollet’s story.
Brutally beaten….receives a scratch pic.twitter.com/vrYzCxo2P4
— ? Amber Lynn ? (@Alynn7513) January 30, 2019
Photo by Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images
