Sean Hannity Slammed for Calling Adam Toledo a '13-Year-Old Man'

Fox News host Sean Hannity has described Adam Toledo, the child shot dead by a Chicago police officer, as a "13-year-old man," drawing comparisons to one of his own television guests' previous characterization of Kenosha shooting suspect Kyle Rittenhouse as a "little boy."

Video footage released Thursday by the Chicago Civilian Office of Police Accountability showed Toledo's final moments before a police officer shot him dead on March 29. Police said an "armed confrontation" led to the shooting, while the Cook County's attorney office alleged Toledo held a gun during the incident.

In bodycam footage, however, Toledo appeared to raise his empty hands moments before he was shot.

Speaking on his radio broadcast The Sean Hannity Show, Hannity said: "We are awaiting the release this hour of Chicago Police bodycam footage that captured the fatal police shooting of a young 13-year-old man by the name of Adam Toledo."

"And if social media is any indication, there's a lot of chatter today about possible unrest," he continued. "I hope it doesn't happen but with Chicago's track record every weekend, I guess you have to go with the odds, considering there are dozens and dozens of shootings and killings every weekend in Chicago, that this might not be particularly good."

Hannity's choice of words, first flagged by Media Matters for America, led social media users to point out infantilizing descriptors attributed to Rittenhouse on the conservative pundit's own television show.

Rittenhouse, 18, is accused of having opened fire at a Black Lives Matter protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin last August, killing two people and seriously injuring another.

In a viral clip shared by Twitter user @_EthanGrey, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi referred to then 17-year-old Rittenhouse as a "little boy" during an appearance on Hannity's show in September last year.

"This kid was out there trying to help people," Bondi said. "Were people killed? Absolutely. But again: we don't know yet."

She continued: "You've got a little boy out there trying to protect his community, should he have been out there with a gun? No. but should he have been charged with murder? We just don't know yet, they charged him two days later."

During the rest of her intervention, Bondi said Rittenhouse—who had traveled from his hometown of Antioch, Illinois to attend the protests—was "a 17-year-old out there trying to protect his state."

"He's helping people who have been injured, he had paramedic training from being a lifeguard, he's taking graffiti off the walls, he's trying to mitigate the chaos out there," she said.

Following the release of the bodycam footage depicting Toledo's killing, John Catanzara, president of Chicago's police union, hailed the shooting officer's actions as "heroic" during a CNN appearance on Thursday.