A northern California city that has had one of the highest rates of fatal police shootings in the state has agreed to pay nearly $3m to the mother of a 21-year-old who was killed by an officer inside his family’s home in 2017.
The family of Angel Ramos has settled its lawsuit with the city of Vallejo and Vallejo police officer Zach Jacobsen, the family’s attorneys announced on Wednesday.
The case in the Bay Area city 30 miles north-east of San Francisco sparked outrage in recent years after records uncovered by the family’s litigation revealed the police department had spread falsehoods about the incident.
On 23 January 2017, Ramos and other relatives were hanging out at a small gathering at the family’s home when a fight broke out between a few of the young men. Police arrived and used their Taser devices on multiple people, and Jacobsen shot Ramos in the neck and chest while he appeared to be fighting a 16-year-old family friend.
Police subsequently said Ramos had been holding a knife, with local news reports headlined: “Officer fatally shoots suspect in knife attack of teen boy” and “21-year-old knife-wielding man dead after officer-involved shooting”.
But the family’s lengthy court battle against the city uncovered the fact that no knife was recovered near Ramos; that two officers on the scene, who did not shoot Ramos, said they had not seen him holding a knife; two paramedics who showed up after the killing also said they had seen no knife near his body; and that the teenage victim told police and later testified that Ramos did not have a knife.
“I was disgusted and angry because they made my brother out to be a monster,” Alicia Saddler, Ramos’s sister, told the Guardian last year, which reported on the case as part of an investigation into how police departments have shared misleading and inaccurate information about the people they have killed. “How can you take my brother’s life and then turn around and make up such a big lie about him? And everybody believed it.”
A judge ruled last year that there was sufficient evidence to go to trial in the family’s civil case. But Melissa Nold, an attorney for the family, said on Thursday that although his relatives wanted to have their day in court, they ultimately they did not want this case to drag on for several more years.
“They wanted the truth to get out about what happened to Angel and they managed to do that,” she said, adding that the initial press release suggesting he was armed with a knife caused the family significant distress for years: “It drove the public away from having an outcry about the case, because they weren’t told the truth about what had happened – that police shot an unarmed man in his home.”
In April 2018, a review board convened by the Vallejo police department ruled that the officer had used reasonable force when he fatally shot Ramos, though the board said he should have turned on his body-worn camera, the East Bay Times reported.
Nold noted that the city has still not retracted its false statements about the knife; in litigation, Jacobsen had continued to claim that Ramos had a knife.
“There will never be a dollar amount high enough to measure the value of Angel’s life and what our family lost,” Angel’s sister, Antoinette Saddler, said in a statement. “We have experienced pain, terror and anxiety that no words can ever explain, and no family should ever have to experience.”
“This blood money will not make us go away and we will continue to demand the termination and prosecution of Jacobsen,” Angel’s mother, Annice Evans, added in a statement.
Vallejo’s police department has a long history of controversy. In recent years, a group of 14 policemen were known by local residents and activists as the “Fatal 14,” because the officers had repeatedly shot and killed citizens without facing consequences.
Representatives for the Vallejo police department and city attorney’s office, which represented the officer, did not immediately respond to inquiries.
Associated Press contributed reporting
