A California city has agreed to pay $5m to the family of a 20-year-old who was sleeping in his car when police approached and shot him 55 times in 2019.
The city of Vallejo, north-east of San Francisco, said in a statement on Wednesday that the city council approved the payout to the relatives of Willie McCoy, an aspiring Bay Area rapper fatally shot by six officers in a case that sparked national outrage. McCoy was in his car at a Taco Bell on 9 February 2019 when the police arrived and quickly fired a barrage of bullets into his vehicle.
Police claimed McCoy had “moved his hands downward” toward a gun, but body-camera footage did not capture that and instead appeared to show that he had been startled awake and moved his hand to scratch his shoulder. The footage also showed that officers had not tried to wake him or announce they were police before pointing firearms at his head. Before McCoy awoke, officers said: “If he reaches for it, you know what to do,” and “I’m going to pull him out and snatch his ass.”
The killing sparked protests in California and significant backlash after a consultant hired by the city concluded that “the 55 rounds fired by six officers in ~3.5 seconds is reasonable based upon my training and experience as a range instructor”.
Prosecutors declined to file charges against the officers.
The case escalated scrutiny of the Vallejo police department, which has an extensive history of brutality and misconduct scandals. From 2010 to 2020, the city had one of the highest rates of police killings in California, and more than a dozen officers have shot multiple civilians on the job without facing consequences. A 2020 investigation by local news site Open Vallejo revealed that some officers commemorated their shootings by bending the points of their badges each time they killed someone.
One of the officers who shot McCoy had previously killed Ronell Foster, 32, an unarmed man who had been riding his bike without a light. The city paid Foster’s family a $5.7m settlement, the largest in Vallejo’s history.
The McCoy family’s civil case had not yet gone to trial and could have dragged on for many more years. The family, however, was divided about settling, said Kori McCoy, one of McCoy’s brothers, and David Harrison, a cousin. They are co-founders of the Willie McCoy Foundation.
“Almost five years ago, Willie McCoy Jr was executed by Vallejo police as the world watched in confusion and our family watched in horror as we tried to comprehend what could possibly warrant so many gun shots into a man sleeping in his vehicle?” the two relatives said in a statement on Thursday. “Our justice system has failed to charge, arrest or release the truth … We know that the system doesn’t work the way we were taught in civics class when we were growing up. It is just a cloaking device to camouflage the racism that is embedded in the very fabric of our legal system designed to protect law enforcement at all costs.”
They said they were hoping to go to trial to bring about systemic change and expose broader problems in the department: “There is no settlement celebration. There is no justice here and we pray that any future families learn from our experience. Hopefully they will be successful in bringing down this wicked system feeding on our people.”
Marc McCoy, another brother, said by phone: “No amount of money is worth Willie’s life. On one hand, you’re relieved you’re getting something for Willie … but this country is so used to these situations that we treat victims as just pieces of money. It’s always: ‘Someone is killed, here’s some money.’ But we are not affecting the lives of police officers who are doing the killing. The taxpayers of Vallejo are paying this debt, not the police. I wish there was a way to hold the police themselves accountable.”
The city’s statement said the settlement “does not imply an admission of liability or wrongdoing by the City of Vallejo or any City employee”.
