The San Diego City Council approved one of the largest settlements for a police shooting in U.S. history on Tuesday — a $30 million payment to the family of a 16-year-old boy who was fatally shot by a San Diego police officer while running away from another shooting.
Konoa Wilson’s parents sued the city and the officer who shot him, San Diego Police Department Officer Daniel Gold, in connection with the teen’s shooting death on the night of Jan. 28. The council voted unanimously to pass the settlement.
According to the family’s lawsuit, the boy was fleeing gunshots fired at him by another person when he encountered Gold, who shot the boy twice in the back “instantly, without any warning.” Konoa was pronounced dead at a hospital less than an hour later.
“What happened to Konoa was a catastrophic failure of policing,” the Wilson family’s attorney, Nick Rowley, said in a statement. “A 16-year-old boy was running for his life. He was not a threat and not a suspect, yet he was shot in the back by a police officer who only saw him for one second before deciding to pull the trigger.”
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The settlement amount was disclosed in a San Diego City Council agenda posted on Friday and exceeds the $27 million the city of Minneapolis agreed to pay the family of George Floyd, whose May 2020 murder by a police officer who knelt on his neck sparked a nationwide racial reckoning, the Associated Press reported.
City Councilman Henry Foster III noted the Floyd murder in his statement on the Tuesday settlement.
“Where’s the progress? Where’s the protect and serve? Better yet, where’s the accountability?” he said. “As the father of a young Black man, this hurts. This could be my son. If only you could understand the fear I feel when my son leaves the house.”
He called on Mayor Todd Gloria and San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl to do better.
“Will you step up? Or will we see what we always see … business as usual?” Foster said. “I do ask the public to keep asking questions.”
The San Diego County District Attorney’s office said the case is still under review for potential criminal charges. San Diego police declined to comment on the settlement, but confirmed Officer Gold is on paid administrative duty and currently not on patrol.
In trolley station surveillance footage released by the police department earlier this year, Konoa can be seen running after another person pulls out a gun and opens fire on him at the station’s west platform.
Gold and another officer were in the area responding to an unrelated report of an assault when the gunshots rang out.
The boy can be seen running down a corridor leading out of the station and emerging on Kettner Boulevard just as Gold was running towards the same corridor.
Body-worn camera footage shows the officer immediately fire on the teen at close range. Rowley said Gold shot the boy “before he even announced who he was.”
After he was shot, the video shows the boy screaming and running briefly before collapsing. Officers then began performing CPR on him and, while doing so, found a handgun concealed under the youth’s clothing near his right thigh, according to police.
There were no indications in the video that the teen fired his gun during the incident or was holding it when Gold, a two-year member of the police department, opened fire on him.
Rowley said the boy had the gun for self-defense, because he had recently been targeted and assaulted by gang members. The attorney said the gun was not believed to be loaded, but more importantly, was not brandished when he was shot.
“This settlement brings some semblance of accountability, but not closure,” Rowley’s statement continued. “You don’t get closure when your child is shot in the back for doing nothing wrong by the people who are supposed to be protecting him.
“We hope that Konoa’s story will send a message across the country: Cities will pay dearly when officers violate the law and take a life without justification. We expect the city of San Diego to ensure this never happens again.”
The boy was killed three months shy of his 17th birthday. In a statement, attorneys said he was “an only child, and his parents lost their only son.”
Police said the person who fired gunshots at Konoa — described only as a 16-year-old juvenile — was arrested just over a week later.
“I’m expressing my most sincere and deepest apologies for what is the deepest nightmare for any parent,” City Councilman Sean Elo-Rivera said at Tuesday’s meeting. “There’s no amount of money that can ever replace a child.”
Elo-Rivera demanded to know what would be done to prevent such shootings in the future, noting that the amount paid out of a public liability fund could and should go to other uses, not to preventable actions like the killing of Wilson.
Ashley Nicholes, a spokeswoman from Chief Wahl’s office, said the department was unable to comment on ongoing legal matters, but said Gold was still working with the department in an administrative capacity.
All shootings involving police undergo various levels of investigation, which are still ongoing in this case. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Office Homicide Unit investigates all SDPD shootings. Its report is then provided to the District Attorney’s Office, which determines if the officers bear any criminal liability for their actions.
The FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office also monitor the investigation and the SDPD’s Internal Affairs Unit will conduct an internal investigation into the actions of the officer, according to Nicholes.
The SDPD Shooting Review Board will evaluate the tactics used and the internal investigation will be reviewed by San Diego’s independent Commission on Police Practices.
In a city document, the settlement is described as “not an admission of liability by any party.”
An agenda item posted Friday said the settlement would be paid from the Public Liability Fund.
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