The city of San Diego has agreed to pay a $30m settlement to the family of Konoa Wilson, the 16-year-old boy fatally shot in the back by a police officer while running away after narrowly missing another shooting by an unknown third party at a train station.
The payout is the result of the wrongful death lawsuit Wilson’s family filed against the city in June, claiming the officer who shot the teen acted with “racial violence”. Wilson is half Black, family attorneys said.
The settlement is considered one of the largest in response to a police shooting in the United States. In 2021, the city of Minneapolis agreed to a $27m civil settlement for George Floyd’s family after he was killed when an officer kneeled on his neck for nine minutes. Floyd said he could not breathe during the May 2020 arrest.
On 28 January, Wilson was standing at the Santa Fe station when another teenager approached him with a gun and started shooting. Wilson ran away from the gunfire and, as he fled, passed by officer Daniel Gold near the station corridor.
As seen on body-worn camera and surveillance footage released by police, Gold pulled out his gun and shot at Wilson’s back as he ran by within seconds of encountering him in the corridor. Footage captured Gold identifying himself as a police officer only after he opened fire.
Wilson was pronounced dead at the hospital 35 minutes later.
Although officers uncovered a firearm on Wilson while providing first aid, Wilson did not brandish a weapon nor threaten Gold at the time the officer opened fire, the civil lawsuit says. The lawsuit accused Gold of “racial violence” by shooting at a Black teenager who was running away.
The suit alleges that due to Gold’s “furtherance of systemic racism”, his immediate perception of Wilson as a “Black person contributed to [Gold’s] decision to shoot [Wilson] without warning when [Wilson] appeared before him”, depriving the teen of “his life and liberty”.
Nicholas Rowley, the attorney who worked on the settlement on behalf of Wilson’s family, told the New York Times Wilson had a gun at the time because he was jumped by gangsters previously, suggesting he had it for protection.
“The reason why he had a gun is because he is half Black and there were kids, some new gangster kids in San Diego, who had jumped him a few times and hurt him so bad he was in a hospital,” Rowley told the Times. “He was afraid.”
According to city documents obtained by CBS 8, the agreement to the settlement was made as a business decision and not an admission of liability.
The Guardian has contacted the San Diego attorney general’s office for comment.
