Judge: Officers fired 44 times in fatal encounter

Jim Walsh | The Courier-Post

CAMDEN - A federal judge has detailed the final moments of a mentally ill city man, saying law enforcement officers fired 44 shots after a 911 call reported an armed man “going crazy.”

Fourteen shots struck Jeffrey Thomas, killing him near his mother’s Whitman Park home in November 2011, U.S. District Judge Jerome Simandle said in a ruling Friday.

But Simandle’s opinion noted a sharp dispute over whether the use of force against Thomas was reasonable.

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Seven officers involved in the shooting "all testified that Thomas was

pointing and trying to fire a gun at them" when they opened fire around 1:30 a.m., the judge said.

One trooper testified he took a gun from Thomas’ hand after the shooting stopped.

But Thomas’ mother, Estella Pratt, and his girlfriend, Ciara Wallace, said Thomas was not brandishing a gun at the time of the shooting. Wallace and two neighbors also claimed the 23-year-old appeared to be surrendering before he was killed.

“He was trying to go down … and then that’s when they just start shooting,” testified David Harris, a resident who said he saw the incident.

Those sharply conflicting views “can only be resolved by a jury,” Simandle said in a 48-page decision.

The wrongful-death suit was brought by Pratt. It seeks unspecified damages on behalf of Pratt and her son’s estate.

Defendants include Camden City and the state of New Jersey, as well as the officers involved in the shooting.

According to Simandle’s ruling, the shooting occurred after Pratt and Wallace called 911 seeking crisis care for the man, who’d been involuntarily committed a month earlier due to schizophrenia.

The decision notes Thomas “had a history of psychiatric problems.”

“When he called me 'Mom,’ I knew it was him,” it quotes Pratt as saying. “When he called me ‘Mother,'” I knew it wasn’t him. It seemed like two different people.”

The women made the first of two 911 calls around 12:30 a.m., when Thomas returned to his mother’s home after going out for marijuana and a soda, the ruling says.

It says Wallace refused to let Thomas into the house after he “said something scary” at the front door. Thomas shouted and kicked at the door before walking away.

“My boyfriend is going crazy,” Wallace said in the first 911 call about that time, the ruling recounts.

A Camden City police officer, Terhan Hinson, responded to the call, but left shortly before Thomas returned to the 1100 block of Whitman Street.

According to Simandle’s decision, Thomas then began “jumping up and down outside the house and calling Wallace’s name.”

The women made a second 911 call, with Pratt saying, “My son’s outside with a gun.”

Two city officers, Hinson and Mark Saunders, responded to that call. Five state troopers on patrol in two vehicles also headed for Pratt’s home.

The officers converged at Everett and Rose streets, where Hinson and Saunders were pursuing Thomas on foot and commanding him to stop.

“What happened next is heavily contested,” Simandle’s ruling says.

According to the ruling, all of the officers claim Thomas appeared to be “holding, pointing, racking, and/or shooting or trying to shoot a gun” in their direction.

Pratt and Wallace, who said they saw the shooting from the mother’s home, claimed they saw no weapon in Thomas’ upraised hands.

Another neighbor, Sonia Rodriguez, testified Thomas did not respond to an order to surrender.

“He just do like this, bend down like that, and they started shooting on him,” she said.

Thomas was killed in the street about 50 yards from his mother’s home, with two parked cars obscuring the line of sight for Pratt and Wallace, the ruling says.

It notes Thomas’s body remained “outside, in view of his mother … for nearly eight hours while the police investigated the scene.”

An investigation determined Hinson and Saunders had fired 22 times.

The five troopers — Robert May, Matthew Moore, Jerome Moran, William Nuemann and Maurice Smith — discharged the same number of bullets.

A State Police detective later found no evidence that a .380 pistol — a gun Neumann said he took from Thomas' hand — had been fired during the incident.

The judge deferred decisions on some counts of the lawsuit, including an allegation that the city failed to properly train Hinson and Saunders to deal with mentally disturbed people.

The municipal police department implemented adopted a policy for such encounters two weeks after the shooting. The city force was replaced in May 2013 by the newly formed Camden County Police Department.

On the unresolved counts, Simandle offered Pratt's attorneys 14 days to address a defense challenge to the admissibility of an expert witness.

The judge rejected a claim that the officers had intentionally inflicted emotional distress on Pratt, but said she could amend her complaint to allege "negligent" infliction of emotional distress.

"It might not be futile for … a mother who directly witnessed her son's death from less than 200 feet away, to add such a claim," Simandle said.

Jim Walsh: @jimwalsh_cp; 856-486-2646; jwalsh@gannettnj.com

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