The KCPD spent big in 2014 to make a potentially explosive lawsuit go away, but the cracks are starting to show
A call came into dispatch about a carjacking. A man said his car, a black 2003 Toyota RAV4, had been stolen at gunpoint near the 7-Eleven convenience store at 1701 Independence Avenue, in northeast Kansas City. The suspect was a black man, around 30, possibly wearing a black hoodie. The man who had called the police believed his cell phone was still in the car. He had a locator app installed on it. The Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department helped the man ping the phone to determine its coordinates. The phone was in what appeared to be an alley just south of Independence Avenue, between Cypress and Elmwood avenues.
It was 1:45 a.m. Monday, November 18, 2013. The Kansas City Chiefs had played a nationally telecast game hours earlier, losing to the Denver Broncos. Crime often spikes on nights like these, and the East Patrol Division — in which the alleged victim’s phone and vehicle were suspected to be — was understaffed. So KCPD officers Dakota Merrill and Shane Mellott, who worked Central Patrol Division, were sent to the scene.
Mellott was 30 years old at the time. Merrill, who comes from a law-enforcement family — his two older brothers are on the KCPD force, and his father is a former Missouri Highway Patrolman — was 23. Speeding down Independence Avenue, they passed Cypress, then made a U-turn and swung their police SUV down Cypress before turning left into an alley. They slowed to a stop and took in their surroundings, shining their flashlights out the side windows. They paused here for about 15 seconds. A wind gust blew little leaves across the alley, illuminated by the car’s headlights.
To their right, the officers noticed another, perpendicular alley. They backed up, turned onto it, and spotted their target: black RAV4, license plates matching the radioed description. It was parked in front of a chain-link fence in the backyard of a two-story house.
Merrill and Mellott got out of their car and approached the vehicle with flashlights out and guns drawn. It was dark in the alley, and the windows of the RAV4 were tinted. They shined their lights into the car and concluded that it was unoccupied. The officers retreated to their car to discuss their next move, and were soon joined by Michael Buckley, an East Zone officer who had just arrived. Merrill shined his flashlight in the direction of the RAV4, to indicate to Buckley where the suspect’s vehicle was parked. As he did, the red brake lights of the RAV4 flashed, and the white reverse lights came on.
The three officers rushed toward the Toyota with their guns drawn. They yelled at the driver to stop the vehicle and raise his hands. Because of the tinted windows, the police could not see inside. Merrill banged on the driver’s-side door and demanded that the driver shut the car off. The car then lurched forward into the chain-link fence in front of it.
Merrill began firing. He unloaded his entire clip — 16 bullets — into the car, shattering the glass of the car windows. Mellott, positioned at the driver’s-side rear door, fired 12 shots of his own. Buckley, who stood by the passenger-side rear door, did not discharge his weapon.
When the smoke cleared, the officers discovered a man named Philippe Lora inside the car, covered in blood and slumped over the driver’s seat. Twenty of the 28 bullets fired had entered his body. When KCPD detectives arrived, Merrill and Mellott both stated that they had fired on Lora because they’d heard a gunshot come from inside the car. But no firearm was found in the car. KCPD investigators brought a gun-sniffing dog to the scene. No gun.
Lora was in critical condition when his ambulance arrived at Truman Medical Center. Incredibly, he survived. He owes his life to the fact that a bullet traveling toward his heart was halted by his spine. That bullet, along with several others, remains lodged in Lora’s body. He is permanently paralyzed from the waist down.
Today, Lora lives in a modest, newly constructed house in the Beacon Hill neighborhood. He’s 40 years old. When I visited, in early May, he was lying on his back in a bed set up in the living room. The room was empty except for a TV in one corner and the wheelchair that waited beside Lora’s bed.
Lora told me he was legally prohibited from discussing what happened the night of November 18, 2013. I asked him instead if he could tell me how the injuries he’d suffered had changed his life.
“Look at me, man,” he said, pulling up his shirt to expose several large scars. “I got all these bullet holes in me. One leg won’t bend up. The other leg won’t bend down. People have to help me into and out of that thing [the wheelchair]. I piss in a bag. I shit in a bag. They fucked me up. All you got to do is look at me.”
In December 2013, Lora filed a civil lawsuit against the KCPD officers who shot him. His attorney, David Smith, originally sued Merrill, Mellott and Buckley, because the KCPD would not disclose which of the officers at the scene had discharged their weapons. When Smith learned that Buckley had not fired his gun, he dropped the complaint against that officer, narrowing the defendants to Merrill and Mellott.
Smith’s law office is located inside One Park Place, the white-and-black condominium tower at the corner of 31st Street and Southwest Trafficway. The building sits on one of the highest points of land in Kansas City, and out Smith’s wide, west-facing window, the view is majestic, stretching miles and miles into Kansas.
Smith has been suing the KCPD for years, but when I met with him recently, he was eager to stress that he is not a cop hater.
“I actually really like cops,” he said. “I have family members who are cops. My problem is the us-versus-them mentality that causes some of them to shoot first and lawyer up later. Their bad days can be lethal, and when they’ve done wrong they should promptly admit it.”
The Lora case echoed other cases Smith had worked on. In 1998, Smith represented the mother of Timothy Wilson, a 13-year-old African-American boy who was shot and killed by KCPD officers after a high-speed chase. Toward the end of the pursuit, Wilson’s pickup truck got stuck in mud in a residential lot; while he was revving the car back and forth to escape the mud, three of the four officers on the scene fired on him.
The officer who fired five shots at Wilson initially told a homicide detective he had shot Wilson because Wilson was driving his pickup truck toward him. Later, that officer’s story changed. He now said he thought he had seen Wilson reach underneath a coat on the passenger seat, where he feared a gun might lay.
Another officer who fired on Wilson also testified that he had shot Wilson because the pickup was moving toward him. But it later emerged that the pickup was veering away from that officer when he fired his shots.
“Nobody was in danger of being run over,” Smith says. “They were to the side of the car.”
Smith tried the case, and a jury awarded Wilson’s mother $700,000 in damages.
In 2000, Smith represented the family of Carol Ann Kerns, a white, 37-year-old pregnant woman who was killed during a routine traffic stop in 1999. After being pulled over by an officer on Southwest Trafficway near downtown, Kerns drove away as the officer walked back to his squad car to run her license. He fired on her and killed her. As Kerns was dying, she crossed into oncoming traffic on Interstate 35.
“His excuse was that he thought she was going to run him over,” Smith says. “But she was driving in the other direction, away from him.”
A grand jury declined to indict the officer. But Smith won a $400,000 settlement in federal court.
Opposing the KCPD in the Lora case, Smith was armed with a particularly favorable set of facts. To begin with, an investigation by the prosecutor’s office of the carjacking incident yielded no charges against Lora.
Then there was the Swiss cheese–like nature of the officers’ rationale for shooting. They said they fired because they’d heard a gunshot, but there was no gun. Merrill offered as additional justification that he had seen Lora reach into the car’s center console, which he said he believed could contain a gun. But Merrill fired into the driver’s-side window, which was tinted. Indeed, Smith says, Merrill and Mellott had failed to notice Lora was in the RAV4 when they checked it the first time because of the dark windows. If they couldn’t see Lora seated in the car before, how could Merrill have seen the driver’s hand move toward the center a few moments later?
“Merrill shot Philippe [Lora] when the car was wedged up against a fence going nowhere, and I think Mellott shot simply because his partner was emptying his clip,” Smith says. “There is a loose pattern to the reasons officers give in a lot of these cases, particularly when the shooting victims are in cars. First, they say they fired shots because they were afraid the suspect was going to run them over in a car. Then they say they saw the suspect reach for something. Finally, they say they heard a shot. You see these same excuses over and over again.”
Smith also identified technical breaches of KCPD protocol in the aftermath of the shooting. For example, Merrill’s brother, who was not on duty, was allowed past the crime-scene tape.
“After an incident like this, the police are supposed to be treated like suspects,” Smith says. “But they [KCPD investigators] don’t treat them like suspects. They let Merrill and Mellott hang out together at the scene afterward. They let Merrill’s brother come through the crime-scene tape and comfort and coach him. They did what’s called a ‘walk through’ — where the investigating cops get together and hear the officers’ joint account of what happened before they commit a statement to paper or on video.”
Smith continues: “That’s not how it is with regular suspects. With regular suspects, you separate them and get them on video immediately. You don’t give them time to get their stories straight.”
Lora’s civil case churned for nearly a year, a period during which police shootings came to dominate the news. Ferguson exploded in August 2014, setting off a wave of civil unrest across U.S. cities. Smith says he believes Ferguson would have been a “verdict enhancer” had the case gone to trial.
But it didn’t. In January 2015, the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners voted to settle the case. Neither the case nor the settlement has previously been reported in the media. But the KCPD has confirmed to me that the amount the department agreed to pay was $4.8 million.
Smith says he believes it’s the largest settlement in the history of the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department.
This spring, as I was investigating the Lora shooting, I learned of another black man in Kansas City who had been shot in his car by the police. His name is Brandon Finch, and KCPD officers fired more than a dozen bullets into his 23-year-old body one night last fall.
Shortly after Finch was shot, a local lawyer, Tom Porto, requested Finch’s investigative case file from the police. The KCPD responded by filing a lawsuit seeking to exempt itself from fulfilling the request, on the grounds that a criminal investigation of Finch was ongoing. Porto argued that the KCPD was in violation of Missouri’s open-records laws. The judge split the difference, ordering that the KCPD hand over the case file to Porto but adding a two-month protective order to it.
In May, about a month after the protective order expired, I requested from the KCPD the incident report related to Finch, as well as all supplemental documents, photos and video pertaining to the investigation. The KCPD denied my request. All I received from the department was a heavily redacted incident report. Curiously, one of the officer’s names was redacted, but the other officer’s name — Craig Leach — was not. Finch’s name was also blacked out, despite the fact that I had referenced his name to request the report. The department informed me that all of the supplemental information I sought was a closed record, “due to the investigation still being open.”
I’ve pieced together details of the Finch shooting through other means. On October 8, 2016, police received reports that someone was driving near 43rd Street and Wabash, firing a gun from the car’s windows. Officers dispatched to the area came upon a silver 2005 Mercury Sable, which raced away when the driver spotted the police car. Police pursued the car for 12 blocks before the driver reached a dead end at 44th Street and Mersington.
Dashcam video shows the officers exit their car slowly, their guns drawn. The Sable is stopped. As they approach it, the driver slowly reverses the car. The two officers immediately begin firing into the Sable. Leach fires six shots. The other officer on the scene — the one whose name is redacted in the report sent to me by KCPD — is the first to fire, unloading a total of nine bullets into Finch.
That officer’s name: Dakota Merrill.
In March, a use-of-force committee convened by the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office cleared Merrill and Leach of any wrongdoing in the Finch shooting. In statements given three days after the shooting, they said they had fired because they were in fear of being run over by the car — which, police video confirms, was moving very slowly. Merrill also said he thought Finch was reaching for a gun. (A gun was found in Finch’s vehicle.)
In April, Finch was charged with armed criminal action and discharging a weapon from a moving vehicle. Porto, who is representing Finch in the criminal case, declined to comment on whether Finch would bring a civil suit against the KCPD for excessive use of force. Like Smith, Porto has successfully sued the KCPD on excessive-force cases, resulting in multiple damage settlements in the past few years. Two of the officers in recent Porto excessive-force suits are no longer with the KCPD.
Merrill, meanwhile, is still on the force. Mellott and Leach are also still employed by the KCPD. The police department declined to comment on whether it views Merrill’s employment as a liability, given the $4.8 million Lora settlement and the possibility of another civil suit from Finch. But it has confirmed that Merrill is now working administrative duty. It is unclear if that reassignment is permanent.
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