© Ted S. Warren / Associated PressA jury assessed $3 million in punitive damages against Lakewood Police Chief Mike Zaro, finding that his department acted recklessly in the fatal shooting of Leonard Thomas.
He grabbed his mother's wrist and took her phone when she tried to call 911.
They were having a family argument. Within hours, 30-year-old Leonard Thomas was dead, killed by a police sniper's bullet on a May night in 2013. In this freeway-divided Tacoma suburb,
the unarmed man was shot on his porch while holding his 4-year-old son in his arms. Police said the minor dispute had turned into a standoff that could only be settled with a militaristic show of force and lethal action.
But on Friday, a federal court jury in Seattle unanimously disagreed, handing down one of the most costly legal verdicts against police officers in Washington state history.
Having heard testimony from an officer's after-incident report boasting that the sniper's bullet, fired from 90 yards away, was a "frickin' million-dollar shot," the jury decided to award Thomas' family $15 million.
The seven-member panel awarded the amount to the family in a civil rights lawsuit as a way of saying local police had overreacted to a minor domestic dispute.
At least 27 officers from the Pierce County Metro SWAT team and two armored vehicles were sent to the scene after Thomas — who was bipolar, had been drinking and was despondent over a friend's death — refused to leave his house.Witnesses during the trial described a battleground setting: One armored transport was driven across a neighbor's yard, through a fence, and parked off the back patio of the Thomas home in the town of Fife. The other vehicle, a BearCat personnel carrier, took position at the front of the house.
Comment: Another man killed by police needlessly. We see time and time again, black and mentally ill people are frequently killed by police who are completely ill-equipped to de-escalate tense situations like the above. The only thing they seem to be able to do is kill.