The FBI paid an informant to drug Fred Hampton, provided a floor plan, then Chicago PD fired 99 bullets — Hampton's gun was never fired

On December 4, 1969, fourteen Chicago police officers arrived at a South Side apartment building before dawn. They fired ninety-nine bullets into a second-floor unit in less than fifteen minutes. Inside lay Fred Hampton, the 21-year-old chairman of the Illinois Black Panther Party, shot dead in his bed. The official story was a firefight. The reality was something far darker.

For years, the Chicago Police Department and FBI maintained that the raid was a justified response to armed aggression from Panthers inside the apartment. Officers claimed they returned fire after being shot at first. This account appeared in police reports and was accepted by much of the media at the time. Law enforcement had every institutional incentive to present the operation as lawful self-defense. The Panthers, they suggested, had provoked the violence.

But forensic investigators told a different story. Ballistics evidence revealed that only one shot had been fired from inside the apartment—and it was not fired by Fred Hampton. The young leader lay in his bed, unconscious, likely unaware of the police presence. Tests later showed he had been drugged with secobarbital, a powerful barbiturate that someone had dissolved into his Kool-Aid the night before.

That someone was William O'Neal, an FBI informant embedded within the Chicago Black Panther chapter. O'Neal did not simply provide information to authorities. According to documents that emerged through COINTELPRO investigations, the FBI paid O'Neal to slip the sedative into Hampton's drink. The Bureau also provided him with a detailed floor plan of the apartment—intelligence that would make the predawn raid far more efficient. When it was over, the FBI rewarded O'Neal with a $300 bonus for his role.