One officer. Two shootings. $6.3 million in settlements paid by Kansas City police
In the early hours of Oct. 8, 2016, Kansas City police were alerted to a series of gunshots along the 3700 block of Wabash Avenue. The shots ended nearly a mile south, suggesting a shooter was on the move.
When officers arrived near the spot where the last gunshot was detected, they shined a spotlight on a 2005 silver Mercury Sable. The car sped away. Officers chased it for 12 blocks, right into a dead end at East 44th Street and Mersington Avenue.
Their guns drawn, two officers got out of their vehicle. When the Mercury started to roll backwards toward their squad car, the officers started shooting. At least 16 bullets hit the 23-year-old man driving the Mercury, his lawyer has said.
After the man’s lawyer inquired about the shooting, the Kansas City Police Department paid $1.5 million in late 2018. The settlement was recently revealed in a records request by The Star, through Missouri’s Sunshine Law.
The Star is not naming the man in this story, at the request of his attorney, Tom Porto. Porto has said the man fears for his safety.
Both officers had fired their weapons before. One had previously been investigated for shooting at a moving vehicle after a short pursuit.
The other, Dakota Merrill, was one of two officers who in 2013 shot an unarmed man. That shooting led to a $4.8 million settlement — one of the largest payments in the department’s history.
Combined, the shootings cost the police department $6.3 million in legal settlements. That’s about $2 million more than the department spent on all other settlements combined in the last two years.
Nathan Garrett, president of the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners, said the state keeps a $1 million fund for such settlements. But amounts larger than that are taken from the department’s budget, which is funded by taxpayers.
Garrett called Merrill’s situation “highly unusual — one of one, I suspect“ but said it was fair to consider the settlements unacceptable. He certainly does.
“We are blessed to have a mostly professional and (disciplined) force, but we’re in a charged and danger-laden business that can bring about bad outcomes; and, regrettably, sometimes those bad outcomes rest with us,” Garrett said in an email Thursday. “Our job is to address those situations squarely and fairly; taking responsibility when the facts require it. That’s what we did here.”
After Merrill’s first shooting, which left a man named Philippe Lora partly paralyzed, a panel of high-ranking police officials reviewed his actions and found no fault with the officers’ training or use of force.
But the second shooting a few years later showed some similarities.
Both Lora and the man in the 2016 shooting are black. Both were shot more than a dozen times in vehicles that were either backing up or rolling backward. Both shootings were resolved the same way: none of the officers were charged. Both ended in large settlements.
The men were lucky to be alive, considering how many times they were shot, said Lora McDonald, executive director of the Metro Organization for Racial and Economic Equity (MORE2), an interfaith social justice organization that has challenged police use of force.
“They both were unloaded on,” she said.
McDonald said there was no evidence officers were being disciplined for shooting civilians. That settlement money, she noted, could have been used for violence prevention programs, training for officers, or body cameras, which Kansas City police don’t have.
“I’m sorry, but you cannot be right in these cases and then the settlements are that high,” McDonald said. “It doesn’t add up.”
In 2017, police said roughly $6 million would cover the initial start-up costs of equipping hundreds of officers with body cameras.
The Rev. Vernon P. Howard, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Kansas City, said no amount of settlement money could repair the damage done to black men and women or the collective trauma they suffer as a community.
“The amounts of settlements, the shootings themselves and the processes are shrouded by secrecy and no accountability,” Howard said. “Therefore we who are victims possess no public trust, only growing frustration, anger and pain.”
Merrill left the police department in July 2019. The department said it could not discuss his tenure with the force, which began in 2012.
He has a valid Class A peace officer license in Missouri, but he is not currently commissioned by a law enforcement agency, according to the state’s Department of Public Safety.
When a Star reporter went to his home Wednesday, Merrill declined to comment on the settlements.
He then told the reporter to get off his property.
Questions raised
As the officers pursued the Mercury Sable that day in October 2016, they hit speeds of 73 mph.
The chase lasted about two minutes and spanned nearly a mile. As the squad car pulled up behind the Mercury at the dead end, one of the officers said over the radio: “Hold the air. ... We are going to be foot bail,” a term used to mean a foot pursuit.
Merrill and another officer got out of their vehicle and yelled commands. As they did, the Mercury slowly rolled down the sloped roadway it was on toward the passenger side of the parked police car, circling around it.
One of the officers, who exited the passenger side of the police car, could be heard saying: “He’s trying to hit me,” according to the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office’s Use of Force Committee, which reviews shootings and other use-of-force incidents.
About 13 seconds passed from the time the officers started to get out of their car to the end of the shooting, Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker, who chairs the committee, wrote in a letter to Police Chief Rick Smith.
One officer fired 10 shots and the other fired five. Eleven separate bullet holes were found on the Mercury.
The driver was shot in his back, neck, arms and hands, his attorney Porto wrote in a court filing.
As it rolled, the Mercury never made contact with the police car. It stopped perpendicular to it.
One of the officers reported to dispatch that shots had been fired. Then the officers yelled that they saw a gun.
“He has a gun on his lap,” one was heard saying on audio captured by the car’s video system.
Police said a pistol was found between the driver’s legs with the muzzle pointed down.
Neither officer identified a gun during the shooting. That “raises some questions,” the use of force committee said.
Both officers told investigators that the driver had a weapon in his right hand just before they started shooting. One of them said the driver raised his “right hand across his chest” with a gun while looking over his shoulder at the other officer.
The police car’s video system captured some of the incident but not all of it. The Mercury moved off camera before the shooting.
On the footage that shows the driver, his right hand appeared to be on the steering wheel. No camera angle showed the driver holding, “let alone pointing,” a firearm, Baker wrote in the letter.
The driver suffered gunshot wounds to his hands. The steering wheel was also damaged. The weapon found in his lap was not damaged by gunshots. The evidence, Baker wrote, would support the argument that the driver could not have been holding the gun when he was shot.
“But the question of whether the State can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the gun was not being handled or raised by the civilian is different than the question this committee is legally required to answer: can the state prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the officers were unreasonable in believing that the civilian was raising a weapon?” Baker’s letter said.
One of the officers said he fired his weapon because he believed the other’s life was in danger. That officer said he knew the suspect had “already shot down the neighborhood and he was going to try to do anything he could to get away.”
“I was scared that he was going to shoot me or run me over with the car,” he said.
The committee — which does not name the officers in its 16-page letter — concluded the video did not overcome the officers’ legal defense. It determined there was insufficient evidence that the officers were not entitled to the force they used.
Baker wrote the committee did not come to its decision lightly. In the end, the letter stated, it was possible the driver was slowly moving his car around police and looking over his shoulder to try to flee from the officers.
It was later determined one shell casing found along Wabash Avenue, where police had responded to the sound of gunshots, was fired from the pistol found in the Mercury, according to the prosecutor’s committee. The driver was charged with firing the weapon.
In April 2018, the man pleaded guilty to discharging or shooting a firearm at or from a motor vehicle.
The man could not be reached for comment for this story.
“With any case of excessive force, the hope is that an individual officer’s actions do not in any way undermine the community’s confidence in the important work that law enforcement officers perform every day,” said Porto, his attorney.
$4.8M settlement
Three years before the shooting at 44th and Mersington, Officer Merrill was involved in a similar incident.
About 1:45 a.m. on Nov. 18, 2013, a man called police from a store at Independence and Highland avenues in northeast Kansas City to say he had been carjacked at gunpoint.
Officers Merrill and Shane Mellot joined the search for the vehicle, a 2003 Toyota RAV4, and found it about 10 minutes later, two miles east of the convenience store, parked in an alley behind a house.
The officers examined the RAV4 with their flashlights and stepped away from it, dash cam video shows.
Minutes later, the RAV4, which was parked up against a fence, began to move — first backing up a few feet, then pulling forward a few feet. Within six seconds, Merrill and Mellot ran to the RAV4 and began shooting. A third officer did not fire his weapon.
Twenty bullets struck the driver, Philippe Lora, his attorney David Smith has said. The injuries left him partly paralyzed.
Lora was never charged in connection to the reported carjacking.
A summary of the incident by police said the officers ordered Lora to get out of the vehicle, but he did not. The officers said they “heard the sounds of apparent gunshots” inside the RAV4.
Lora’s lawsuit accused police of conspiring to “escape accountability” for the shooting by reporting that they heard gunshots coming from the car — something that could not have happened because Lora had no gun.
