The parents of a 33-year-old woman shot and killed by Springfield police in March during a traffic stop are suing the city, alleging officers escalated the encounter, failed to recognize their child suffered from schizophrenia and didn’t give her a chance to follow their orders.

The wrongful death suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Eugene, seeks $10 million in damages, alleging the officers were negligent and used excessive force.

Ten months before the shooting, Stacy Kenny’s parents, Barbara and Christopher Kenny, had met with a Springfield police officer and informed him that their child suffered from schizophrenia, had been off her medication for about six to eight weeks and may exhibit odd behavior but wasn’t hostile, the suit says.

“They were alerting law enforcement so that law enforcement would have situational awareness and react appropriately, were they to encounter (Kenny),’’ attorney David D. Park wrote in the complaint.

As a result of that conversation, Springfield police had flagged Kenny’s name in their database as a “suspicious subject’’ to alert officers if they had contact with her.

But the officers who stopped Kenny on March 31 barely talked to her, ratcheted up the encounter by suddenly breaking out the windows of her car to try to forcibly pull her out without warning, stunned her with a Taser gun that had little effect and then entered her car, the suit says.

Kenny “suffers from paranoia,” Park said.

At a news conference in April, Lane County District Attorney Patty Perlow announced that she had ruled the police shooting lawful. She said the sergeant who shot Kenny did so after he couldn’t get control of the steering wheel in Kenny’s car as Kenny took off and the car traveled about 70 mph.

Springfield Police Chief Rick L. Lewis said then that the sergeant “truly believed he was going to die in that crash.’’ The sergeant who killed Kenny didn’t want to use deadly force, “but under the circumstances, and in the nanoseconds, he had to make those decisions to do that,’’ the chief said.

Despite the parents’ alert to police in June 2018, no one involved in the March encounter recognized who Kenny was until an hour into the shooting investigation, according to the district attorney.

On Friday, Amber Fossen, a spokeswoman for the city of Springfield said, "We are currently reviewing the documents and have no further comment at this time.''

Note: In early reporting about Kenny’s death, Springfield police referred to Kenny, who was transgender, by her birth name, which she reserved for use by her family. The Oregonian/OregonLive initially and erroneously used her birth name based on the information provided by police but this article has now been updated.

-- Maxine Bernstein

Email at mbernstein@oregonian.com

Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian

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