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CHICAGOLAWBULLETIN.COM                                                THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2017

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Volume 163, No. 184                                                  Serving Chicago’s legal community for 162 years

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Jury: $4.75M for siblings shot by cop


Police officer fired 11
times at porch party
on New Year’s Eve 



 

 

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   Jeffrey J. Neslund  Robert L. Robertson  Michael D. Robbins

 

BY LAURAANN WOOD

Law Bulletin staff writer

A Chicago federal jury awarded $4.75 million Monday to three siblings who were shot several times and severely injured when a Chicago police officer fired 11 shots into the back porch of a New Year’s Eve party.

 

Siblings Kierra, Princeton and Michael Williamson sued Chicago police officer Wilfredo Ortiz and the city in 2014, alleging he used excessive force and violated their 14th Amendment rights in the incident.

The three were attending a party at their cousin’s boyfriend’s house on West 105th Street when the boyfriend fired gunshots into the air to celebrate the new year, their attorney Jeffrey J. Neslund said.

“When Ortiz runs down the alley, [the cousin’s boyfriend] tosses the gun on the porch and then the officer just starts firing,” said Neslund, a solo attorney. “Princeton Williamson instinctively raises his hands over his head and he gets shot in the groin.”

Michael Williamson never saw the officer or heard the shots, Neslund said; all he saw was the gun getting tossed on the porch.

“Michael just instinctively turns and he catches about four or five shots the right shoulder, the abdomen, the right hip and the back. He collapses in the doorway,” he said.

Kierra was standing in the house’s kitchen next to her brother Thaddeus Williamson in the line-of-sight in the doorway at the time. She began trying to pull Michael into inside after he collapsed and was struck as well.

“His youngest sister is trying to pull him into the house through the open back door and she can hear shots whizzing past her,” Neslund said. “The testimony was she didn’t know who it was, but she could see a guy shooting — white flashes coming out of the gun — and she got shot through-and-through in the stomach.”

Princeton Williamson — who was shot in the groin through testicular arteries and his bladder — required four separate surgeries to repair his injuries. His abdomen remained an open cavity for about eight days so his wounds could heal, Neslund said. Kierra suffered injuries to her abdomen, large intestine and hip bone before the bullet exited through her backside. She was bed-ridden for two weeks after getting discharged from the hospital so her wounds could heal from the inside out, he said.

“She has residual nerve damage from the gunshot wound to the hip, and she had 6 centimeters of her large intestine removed because there were two bullet holes in it,” he said. “… [T]hey sent her home with this 15 inch open stomach wound that she had to have a nurse come to the house and do daily changes twice a day.”

Michael, who was home on leave from the Navy at the time, was shot through his liver and now requires a colostomy bag to aid in proper bodily function. He also suffered a right shoulder injury and now experiences radial nerve damage that causes limitations in lifting his arm, Neslund said. Michael was later honorably discharged from the Navy.

During a walk-through with supervisors and detectives following the incident, Neslund said, Ortiz said one person in a group of four or five on the back porch pointed a gun at him, refused verbal orders to drop it and so he shot in fear of his life.

However, Neslund said Ortiz’s recorded statement with the Independent Police Review Authority “completely changes his story.”

“He says there was one person only on the porch and that was a light-skinned African-American, and there were not four to five people on the porch,” he said.

“In this statement, you can hear people whispering answers to Ortiz at critical questions and at least five times at critical ques- tions, they turn off the recorder. Like, ‘Do you have any other idea how two other people got shot?’ then they turn the recorder off and when it turns back on he says he has no idea.”

The review authority also failed to interview any of the 17 people who witnessed the incident during its two-year investigation, Neslund said.

“I don’t know what they did for two years because the only thing they did was interview Ortiz and no one contested it,” he said. “IPRA did not include any of the findings from the forensic evidence — the DNA results, gun-shot residue. It was the typical IPRA whitewash. They made one effort to interview Kierra, and they went to the wrong address.” Based on the IPRA report, Neslund said, Michael Williamson was charged with aggravated assault. However, he was acquitted of the charge following a trial before Cook County Associate Judge James Michael Obbish. Neslund represented him during his criminal proceedings.

“No fingerprints, no DNA, no gunshot residue connected Michael to the gun,” he said. “So if he was the guy who was shoot- ing holiday shots, there would be a blowback of residue on the gun or the sleeve of his coat.”

During the siblings’ trial before U.S. Circuit Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman, Neslund said, Ortiz contended Michael Williamson pointed a gun at him and nothing was obstructing his view when he fired shots toward the porch.

He said Ortiz also contended he didn’t know how two other people got shot in the incident — even after being shown the metal screen door that was between him and two people who were injured inside the house.

“To this day he does not know that he shot the three people. I asked him, ‘When did you first learn that you shot three people that night?’ He said, ‘I don’t know that I ever learned that.’ He’s trying to make it sound like there was gunplay at the house, and perhaps somebody else shot Kierra or Princeton,” Neslund said.

“Their lawyer argued with a straight face that since none of the bullets that were pulled out of the victims were compared to Ortiz’s gun that we hadn’t met our burden of proof that Ortiz in fact shot Kierra and Princeton. It was appalling.”

Avi T. Kamionski, a partner at Nathan & Kamionski LLP who represented the defendants, could not be reached for comment.

In compensatory damages, the jury awarded $750,000 to Kierra Williamson, $1.5 million to Princeton and $2 million to Michael. The jury also awarded the siblings $500,000 in punitive damages against Ortiz — $250,000 for Kierra, $150,000 for Princeton and $100,000 for Michael.

Neslund said the three are “obviously very happy that the jury heard all the evidence and rejected the defendant’s version” of the case.

“This is no doubt life-changing amount of money for all three of them, but I think Michael, he planned a career in the Navy. And for him, he went from sailing around the world on aircraft carriers to now where he’s working part-time stocking shelves on Walmart,” he said. “He’s very thankful for the jury and the award, but this doesn’t come close to bringing him to the life he had before.”

The Williamsons were also represented by Robert L. Robertson, a partner at Robertson Duric, and solo attorney Michael D. Robbins. The federal case is Williamson, et al., v. The City of Chicago, et al., 14 CV 6397.

Copyright © 2017 Law Bulletin Media. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from Law Bulletin Media.