Tag: Lodo

After more than three years of painful recovery and an eight-day jury trial, six bystanders wounded during a 2022 police shooting in downtown Denver are hoping for some relief.

“They were worried about the little things, like getting nervous around girls,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Omeed Azmoudeh told jurors in Denver District Court on Thursday during closing arguments in the civil case. “And then, in a moment: bang, bang, bang, bang.”

In the early hours of July 17, 2022, the lively night atmosphere in Lower Downtown was shattered by gunshots as three Denver Police Department officers fired on 23-year-old Jordan Waddy, who they suspected had been involved in a fight near the Larimer Beer Hall.

The officers — Brandon Ramos, Kenneth Rowland and Megan Lieberson — shot Waddy as he pulled out a gun hidden in his waistband. While Rowland and Lieberson shot the man from the front, Ramos fired from the side, toward the crowd behind Waddy.

By the time Ramos fired, Waddy had already been shot by other officers and fallen to the ground, Azmoudeh said.

Six bystanders in the crowd were injured that night, either by bullets or flying shrapnel, Azmoudeh said. Ramos’ “reckless and unreasonable” conduct constitutes battery on all six victims, he added.

“(Ramos) can’t be the first and only person to shoot into a crowd and then say it was his only option,” Azmoudeh said, dismissing the officer’s self-defense claim. He said Ramos and his defense have talked about the community as “collateral to routine police work.”

Peter Doherty, Ramos’ attorney, said during Thursday’s closing arguments that the now-former Denver police officer was trying to nip the threat of an active shooter in the bud.

Police tried to direct Waddy back into the open street, away from the crowd, but he didn’t listen and reached for his weapon, Doherty said. Ramos, who he said routinely dealt with shootings and weapons-related violence in the area, decided Waddy “wouldn’t give up” and would likely escalate the situation.

“The reasonableness of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight,” Doherty said, referencing a 1968 U.S. Supreme Court decision.

He said the entire trial has evaluated Ramos’s actions through that hindsight, with no allowances for the danger or high-stress situation.

The victims suffered “egregious” injuries and went through an event that they shouldn’t have had to endure, but that doesn’t make Ramos responsible, Doherty said.

Both sides disagreed on the number of bullets Ramos shot and when he fired.

The plaintiffs’ attorney said Ramos fired twice, pointing to two bullets found away from the main crime scene that are believed to have injured the six bystanders. The bullets tore through multiple people and ricocheted off nearby objects, sending shrapnel into the crowd, before settling on the pavement, Azmoudeh said.

But Doherty told jurors the evidence could only prove Ramos fired once, and it wasn’t clear from the body camera video where he was aiming.

While investigators recovered eight bullets, they only found seven shell casings at the scene, Doherty said. Nearby cameras also captured seven audio pulses and a total of seven rounds were missing from the officers’ weapons.

Ramos’s gun magazine was equipped to fit an extra bullet, and any of the shots fired could have masked the sound of the eighth shot, since all rounds were fired in less than two seconds, Azmoudeh said.

Doherty dismissed both explanations as speculation.

“The defendants do not have a unifying theory as to what happened, but that’s not our burden to prove,” Doherty said. “…We’re not trying to throw smoke and mirrors, we’re just saying the evidence is missing.”

The civil trial follows a criminal prosecution of Ramos by the Denver District Attorney’s Office.

A grand jury indicted Ramos on 14 criminal counts in January 2023, including second-degree assault, third-degree assault, prohibited use of a weapon and reckless endangerment.