A Black Colorado mother, her daughter, sister and two nieces who endured a traumatizing ordeal of mistaken identity at the hands of the Aurora Police Department in the parking lot of a nail salon in August 2020, have reached a $1.9 million settlement following a lawsuit against the suburban Denver city and its officers.
Brittney Gilliam and her young relatives were enjoying a family outing with plans to get their nails done and eat ice cream when they were forced out of their SUV, handcuffed and held at gunpoint by Aurora police officers who had mistakenly identified Gilliam’s car as stolen, according to the lawsuit filed in January of 2021.
The lawyer for Gilliam’s family, David Lane, announced the settlement on Monday, the Associated Press reported.
“Hopefully, this settlement will lead to changes in how police departments handle situations like this in the future,” Lane told Atlanta Black Star in an email.
Gilliam’s daughter was 6, her sister was 17 and her nieces were 12 and 14 at the time of the Aug. 2, 2020, incident, during which officers forced them to lie on their fronts on the parking lot’s pavement, body camera footage obtained by Atlanta Black Star shows. The high temperature in Aurora that day was 85 degrees Fahrenheit, Weather Underground’s historical data showed.
Gilliam and two of the teenage girls were handcuffed behind their backs, and the family was detained for over two hours.
The Aurora Police Department said after the Aug. 2, 2020, incident, which was captured on video, that a license plate scanner indicated Gilliam’s Colorado plate matched a stolen vehicle, but the allegedly stolen vehicle was a motorcycle with Montana plates, the lawsuit stated.
“Ms. Gilliam repeatedly asked to show Officer Defendants her registration which would have immediately revealed that her vehicle was not stolen, yet none of the officers permitted her to undertake this simple action,” according to the lawsuit.
The City of Aurora confirmed the settlement in a statement to Atlanta Black Star.
“The Aurora Police Department remains committed to strengthening the relationship with the community through accountability and continuously improving how it serves the public,” city spokesperson Matt Brown said in an email.
The settlement funds will be divided equally among Gilliam and the girls, with the younger girls’ portions being placed into annuities to grow until they access it at age 18, Lane said, according to the AP.
The January 2021 lawsuit stated that there was no indication that the family posed any threat to the officers and said the ordeal left the family “permanently traumatized.”
“The deplorable fact that multiple Aurora police officers held innocent Black children handcuffed and at gunpoint, and multiple other officers did not intervene, is evidence of the profound and systematic problem of racism and brutality within APD,” according to the settled lawsuit.
The lawsuit said the family had entered therapy to deal with the impacts of the incident.
“Mentally, it destroyed me because I felt like not only am I not safe, these kids aren’t safe,” Gilliam said in a pre-settlement interview, the AP reported.
Former Aurora police chief Vanessa Wilson, who was named in the lawsuit, apologized for the incident the day after it occurred through a statement on social media.
Prosecutors who investigated the incident did not find evidence that the Aurora officers committed any crimes, the AP reported, partly because they followed training protocol for high-risk stops involving a vehicle suspected to be stolen. Prosecutors did call the incident “unacceptable and preventable” and urged the department to review its policies to avoid a similar ordeal.
“Aurora cops need to spend less time on the gun range and more time in the law library. Our hope is that police officers all over the country learn that law enforcement needs to use common sense, especially when dealing with children,” Lane told Atlanta Black Star.
“A robocop mentality will lead to huge liability. We believe that inexcusable racial profiling was involved in this case as well. When the race of the occupants of a vehicle causes guns to be drawn, a line has been crossed which will result in expensive consequences for the police,” Lane said.
Darian Dasko, one of the officers who stopped Gilliam’s Dodge, received a 160-hour suspension, and he, along with the other officer, Madisen Moen, still works at the Aurora Police Department, according to the AP.
In another case of police misconduct, the city of Aurora in 2021 reached a $15 million settlement with 23-year-old Elijah McClain’s parents following the animal shelter volunteer’s Aug. 30, 2021, death after being placed by officers in a chokehold, handcuffed and later injected with the powerful sedative of ketamine, Atlanta Black Star previously reported.
