The parents of a 22-year-old Colorado man who was fatally shot by police officers while suffering from a mental health crisis will receive $19 million from the state government and local agencies, according to a settlement announced Tuesday that also includes changes to the lineup of the agents.
The death of Christian Glass after his van got stuck in the mountain town of Silver Plum last year it drew national attention and sparked campaigns for authorities to change the way they treat people with mental health problems.
As part of the deal, Sally and Simon Glass they called for changes that they hope will prevent another family from suffering a loss like theirs. Clear Creek County will establish a crisis response team and its police department will train and certify all officers in crisis management, according to documents released by its attorneys.
The State of Colorado, which had three officers at the scene where Glass was killed on June 11, 2022, in addition to officers from local departments, will create a virtual reality educational platform for the Colorado State Patrol based on the shooting and focused on the de-escalation of stressful situations with agents from different agencies.
State and Hunt Division officials will also see a video message from Simon and Sally Glass at the start of their active witness training. That program focuses on prompting officers to intervene if they believe another officer has gone too far or needs to get out of an incident.
Based on body camera footage, there was no indication that officers from other departments attempted to prevent the vehicle from being forced open before Christian Glass was shot.
An attorney for the Glass family, Siddhartha H. Rathod, said they hoped knowing their story would help officers have the strength to intervene if necessary.
“Any one of the seven officers that were there could have stopped this just by saying something. They want to give that value to the security forces, ”he said about the shooting.
The settlement, which also involved the towns of Georgetown and Idaho Springs, is the largest for a police death in Colorado, surpassing the $15 million settlement reached in 2021 for the death of Elijah McClain, and it’s also among the first in the United States, Rathod said. His law firm, Rathod Mohamedbhai LLC, also represented the mother of McClain, a 23-year-old black man who died in 2019 after he was forcibly restrained by police in Aurora, a Denver suburb, and injected with ketamine by a paramedic. , a powerful sedative.
(with information from AP)
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Source-www.infobae.com