Oakland pays $75,000 to settle 2011 fatal shooting by police

The Oakland City Council voted Tuesday to pay $75,000 to settle a wrongful death claim from the families of Fletcher Jackson and John Sloan, two men who were shot dead by Oakland police in 2011 after officers got a tip that a violent gang crime was about to happen in a quiet Fruitvale neighborhood.

Jackson and Sloan were killed after police stopped their car as they were driving up the 3000 block of Curran Avenue on May 18, 2011. According to a federal lawsuit filed the following year by the slain men’s families, an unmarked police cruiser swerved into the men’s path at about 10:30 p.m., and police Officers Ersie Joyner and Victor Garcia jumped out with their guns drawn.

Jackson, Sloan and another companion, Wynn Brewer, had been the targets of a “secret operation” of the Oakland police and federal law enforcement, the lawsuit said. Prosecutors from the Alameda County district attorney’s office said the men were part of a larger murder plot and were on their way to carry out a killing when police intervened.

Police said in court filings that they had learned about the alleged plot by wiretapping the phone of another suspect, Patrick Shields, who was later charged — along with Brewer — with conspiracy to commit murder. They were convicted by an Alameda County jury in October 2014.

But civil rights attorney John Burris, who represented Jackson and Sloan in their families’ case against the city, said the police used vague intelligence to justify a needless killing.

“The officers were intent on detaining and arresting the young men based upon vague and ambiguous information that the three young men were intending to engage in some form of violence at some later point in the future,” the lawsuit said.

Jackson was unarmed at the time he was shot, attempting to flee the car. He was then handcuffed and forced to sit on the curb “while blood oozed from his gunshot injury,” the lawsuit said. He died at the scene.

Sloan emerged from the vehicle with a gun and managed to flee 20 or 30 yards before Joyner shot him in the back of the head, according to the lawsuit.

In an affidavit filed in 2012 Oakland police Officer Anthony Tedesco said that Sloan had raised a gun at the police before he was shot.

Rachel Swan is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan