An unarmed 37-year-old Black man named Kilyn Lewis was shot and killed by a Colorado cop last year after raising his hands while holding a cellphone.
But it took nearly a month for Aurora police to acknowledge Lewis had been unarmed and holding a cellphone when he was shot and killed by a cop named Michael Dieck – despite several body cameras capturing the shooting.
“I don’t have nothing! I don’t have nothing!” Lewis yelled after he was shot, seconds after several Aurora police officers surrounded him with their guns drawn, barking contradictory orders.
Dieck fired a single shot within seven seconds of first telling Lewis to get on the ground. Body camera video shows Lewis was bending down with his hands up, apparently trying to comply with their conflicting commands.
Eigthteenth Judicial District Attorney John Kellner said his office determined “there is no criminal liability on the part of Officer Michael Dieck stemming from this OIS.” The case was presented to the Arapahoe County Grand Jury for consideration, but the grand jury “declined to accept the case for further investigation,” according to Kellner.
Last month, exactly one year after the shooting, Lewis’ family filed a wrongful lawsuit against the Aurora Police Department, accusing the cops of using excessive force and negligence.
According to the lawsuit filed on May 23 by Colorado attorneys Irwin Farley and Elisabeth Owen:
As the officers approached Kilyn with their guns drawn, Defendant Dieck commanded to Kilyn to “get on the ground.”
One or more additional officers gave Kilyn other, sometimes conflicting commands, including to “show his hands.”
Defendant Dieck and the other officers were within approximately 15 feet of Kilyn, with their weapons raised and pointed directly at him.
From this time until the shooting, which happened mere seconds later, Kilyn attempted to comply with the conflicting verbal commands being shouted at him.
Hearing these conflicting verbal commands, Kilyn turned towards Defendant Dieck and raised his hands while squatting to get on the ground as ordered. Immediately after Kilyn raised his hands and began to bend his knees, Defendant Dieck fired one shot directly at Kilyn, aimed at center mass.
“This lawsuit is not just about a dollar amount. It’s about truth. It’s about making sure that the life of a Black man like Kilyn Lewis is not so easily discarded,” said MiDian Shofner, CEO of the Epitome of Black Excellence and Partnership and lead advocate for the family, in a statement to local media.
“No amount of money can bring him back, but since America has made money the metric for justice, the family is rightfully pursuing every legal remedy available.”
The Aurora Police Department has a notorious history of profiling and abusing Black people, including Elijah McClain, the Black man killed by a fatal overdose of ketamine in 2019 after he was confronted by police for walking down the street wearing headphones, resulting in a $15 million settlement for his family.
McClain’s death led to a consent decree, which uncovered a long pattern of racial profiling within the department.
In 2021, Aurora police were sued over another incident in which they wrongly detained a Black family at gunpoint in 2020, ordering a mother and her three children to lie on the ground, wrongly believing the mother had been driving a stolen vehicle.
In Lewis’s case, it should have been obvious to trained cops that he had only been holding a cellphone, the claim states.
“Kilyn was simply holding his cell phone, which was easily visible to the naked eye at the close distance that the officers were to Kilyn, when Defendant Dieck shot him.”
Watch the video below.
Little Probable Cause
Lewis’ shooting took place on May 23, 2024, as the Aurora SWAT team was moving in to arrest him on a warrant for attempted murder stemming from a shooting earlier that month.
In the shooting that took place on May 5, 2024, surveillance video shows a passenger from inside a red Monte Carlo shooting toward individuals inside a black SUV, according to an investigation by 9NEWS published October 2024.
Aurora police responded to the shooting and found shell casings in the area and also discovered a bystander who had nothing to do with the dispute was taken place between the individuals in the two vehicles had been shot in the shoulder.
Police claimed a tipster had told them Lewis had been driving the red Monte Carlo, and state records revealed that a red Monte Carlo was registered to Lewis.
But other than that, there was no probable cause tying Lewis to the shooting because the license plate number on the Monte Carlo was not visible in the video, according to Scott Robinson, an attorney described as a 9NEWS legal analyst in the article.
“What was needed was probable cause – and there is that, but not by much,” Robinson said.
Based on the available evidence at the time, Robinson said Lewis “had a chance of winning the case, assuming there wasn’t additional evidence” had he not been shot and killed.
“Sometimes the evidence doesn’t look as good when you actually get into a courtroom,” he said. “The prosecution certainly had a good chance of winning the case, but it was anything but a slam dunk.”
Dieck has been involved in several prior shootings and has been mentioned in several lawsuits as well, including an incident in 2020 where Aurora police detained a Black man named Teddy Pittman at gunpoint, accusing him of being a fugitive, only to discover he was the wrong Black man.
However, they still issued him a citation for making an illegal left turn, which was later dismissed by a judge.
“I was shocked,” Pittman told 9NEWS at the time. “I was just minding my own business.”
