Miami agrees to pay $500,000 for Killing Black Teen
The city has agreed to pay $500,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by the family of an unarmed 18-year-old shot to death by police, who were likened in an inquest to ``Keystone Kops,'' family attorneys said Monday. The settlement, which requires the approval of the city commission and a federal judge, would bring payments to numerous families of Miami police shooting victims to more than $5 million since the mid-1990s. Community outrage over the rash of shootings led to a departmental shake-up and policy changes. Nicholas Singleton was shot in the back of the head as he stood on a rooftop after running away from a stolen car after a six-minute chase in April 2001. The officers involved thought they were after suspects in an armed carjacking that had been solved weeks earlier and didn't know that arrests had been made. The police computer had not been updated with the new information. The excessive-force lawsuit had been set for trial Monday, but the city planned to appeal a decision by U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke keeping two police officers as defendants along with the city. Both sides met for mediation, and a settlement notice was filed Wednesday. "The city could have sat back and said, 'We'll wait the year''' for the appeal to progress, said Jim McGuirk, another family attorney. ``They made a genuine effort to get the case settled.'' There was no immediate comment from city attorneys. Singleton was a passenger in a speeding Jeep that police didn't know was stolen, but mix-ups with the dispatcher and the police computer system made the patrol officer mistakenly think the Jeep had been involved in an armed carjacking. Before the settlement push, the city lost a series of rulings. Cooke had decided that jurors would not be told that the Jeep was stolen because the officers didn't know it when they fired or that Singleton had a juvenile police record and a history of drug use because police never claimed he was under the influence when he died. Three officers fired a total of 18 shots, but the bullet type could not pin the fatal shot to any police gun. In the foot chase, one officer fired at another when he saw someone with a gun through a vine-covered fence. [ more ]