WASHINGTON (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 20th April, 2023) The family of Tyre Nichols, the 29-year-old Black man beaten to death by five Memphis officers, sued the city, police department, and police chief Cerelyn Davis for $550 million, a court filing and family attorneys revealed on Wednesday.
Nichols died on January 10, three days after Memphis Police Department (MPD) officers beat him for three minutes during a traffic stop. Five officers involved were fired and charged with second-degree murder, among other crimes. The city also disbanded the Street Crimes Operation to Restore Peace In Our Neighborhoods (SCORPION) special unit the officers belonged to.
"This lawsuit is a civil indictment under the laws of the United States against the City of Memphis, its Police Department, its Chief of Police, the SCORPION Officers involved, and all those complicit in the deprivation of Tyre Nichol's constitutional rights, his pain and suffering in his last days on this Earth, and his wrongful death on January 10, 2023," the document, filed in a Federal district court in Tennessee, said.
In a tweet later in the day, the Ben Crump law firm representing the Nichols said the family is suing for $550 million.
The 139-page complaint says the innocent victim was a 29-year-old father of one who was on his way home to have dinner with his parents, as evidenced in video clips released a few weeks after the beating.
"On January 27, 2023, the world bore witness to videos of a gruesome, barbaric display of police brutality on the streets of a quiet neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee from the night of January 7, 2023," the lawsuit reads. "Caught on film for all to see was the abhorrent and reprehensible conduct of the City of Memphis' unqualified, untrained, and unsupervised police officers, acting under the color of law and pursuant to officially sanctioned, unconstitutional policies and practices."
The lawsuit contends that SCORPION members were instructed to strike without warning and, many times, without any valid constitutional basis. And consistent with the directives received from Davis, herself, the lawsuit said, SCORPION Officers carried out untold Fourth Amendment violations with a focus on Black men living in Memphis.
The lawsuit compares Nichols' beating to that suffered by Emmett Till in 1955 at the hands of vigilantes and described the officers involved in the beating as a "modern-day lynch mob."
"Rather than 'restore peace' in Memphis neighborhoods, the SCOPRION Unit brought terror," the filing said.
