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Mother of woman killed after standoff with Prairie Village police files suit seeking $4M in damages

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The mother of a woman killed two years ago after a standoff with Prairie Village police has filed a civil lawsuit seeking $4 million in damages against the city and nine officers involved in the incident.

Lawyers for Beverly Stewart, mother of Susan Stuckey, filed a motion in U.S. District Court last week seeking a jury trial on charges that the department used excessive force against Stuckey, and that its policies and procedures governing critical incident response are inadequate and unconstitutional.

Johnson County District Attorney Steve Howe announced a month after the March 31, 2010, shooting that his office’s investigation into the incident found the use of force against Stuckey was justified under Kansas law and pressed no criminal charges against the officers involved.

According to the incident report filed by the Johnson County Multi-Jurisdictional Officer-Involved Shooting Investigation Team – a document released to Stewart and her attorneys after a Johnson County judge ordered so in March – Prairie Village police had surrounded Stuckey’s apartment with the intent to have her involuntarily committed to the psychiatric unit at The University of Kansas Hospital.

Stuckey was clinically depressed, and had left a series of inflammatory phone messages with KSHB TV-41’s Elizabeth Alex – a childhood acquaintance — the night before the incident claiming she would “commit suicide by cop.” (Alex was out of town and did not receive the messages until after the shooting).

On March 31, two Prairie Village police officers arrived at her apartment to check on her welfare prior to a scheduled eviction hearing April 1. Stuckey became erratic when the officers arrived, threatening them with a baseball bat and telling them they would have to kill her. Prairie Village police then activated their Critical Incident Response Team, which was supervised by Sgt. Byron Roberson and Capt. Wes Lovett.

After a standoff, the police moved to send a team of officers into Stuckey’s apartment, knocking her door down with a battering ram. The officers were wearing riot gear and helmets. Stuckey was armed with a baseball bat, which she swung at the officers as they entered. In a struggle, officers separated Stuckey from the bat, and two officers fired Tasers at her. Though some of the Taser probes struck Stuckey, they did not pierce her clothing, so she remained conscious and continued to threaten police.

At that point, the police report states, Stuckey reached for a knife on the ground and turned to Roberson. Roberson told her to drop the knife, but she raised it over her head and made a move to throw it at him.

“He (Roberson) did not think she could stab him but he did fear she could throw the knife and strike his face and kill him,” the police report states. “Sergeant Roberson advised he was in fear of his life so he advised he shot her three times.”

Stuckey did throw the knife at Roberson, but it struck his armor and bounced to the floor. Stuckey died at the scene from the gunshot wounds.

The suit against the department and the officers alleges that police “grossly violated widely accepted law enforcement standards on crisis intervention and the use of force” and “failed to use a trained negotiator or trained mental health care professional to communicate with Ms. Stuckey” and “needlessly escalated the situation.”

The District Attorney’s investigation into the matter found that Roberson’s actions fell within the bounds of the statute that governs the use of deadly force by law enforcement officers, which states that an officer is “justified in using force likely to cause death or great bodily harm only when such officer reasonably believes that such force is necessary to prevent death or great bodily harm to such officer or another person…”

Howe affirmed that Roberson’s actions met that threshold in a letter sent to Prairie Village Police Chief Wes Jordan after his office’s investigation.

“Your officer acted appropriately in using verbal commands and non-lethal force in an attempt to overcome her resistance,” Howe wrote. “Unfortunately, the decedent armed herself with a knife and ignored multiple commands to drop it. She in fact attacked the officer with the knife, placing him in a position where he had to use deadly force to protect himself and the other members of the entry team.”

Nine officers are named individually in the suit. They are Roberson, Lovett, Jordan, Capt. Tim Schwartzkopf, Seth Meyer, John Olson, Dan Stewart, Benjamin Micheel, and Adam Taylor.

About the author

Jay Senter
Jay Senter

Jay Senter is the founder and publisher of the Post.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in business at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, where he worked as a reporter and editor at The Badger Herald.

He went on to receive a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Kansas, where he earned the Calder Pickett Award. While he was in graduate school, he also worked as a reporter for the Lawrence Journal-World.

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