The development was first reported by Cleveland.com.
“There is no amount of money that will make up for what John Sanders lost—an eye and his precious right to free speech. Irony isn’t even the right word given that what Mr. Sanders was peacefully protesting at the George Floyd protest was unchecked police brutality,” Subodh Chandra, one of his attorneys, said in a statment to Scene.
Sanders, in a lawsuit filed the summer of 2021, said he was downtown peacefully taking photographs when the round, one of dozens fired by deputy Bruce Lourie, struck him in the head, sending pellets into his eye. Two surgeries followed; the eye couldn’t be saved.
The suit alleged that the county Sheriff’s Department had no training in place for crowd control or the use of beanbag rifles, that it was negligent in the hiring of “troubled” deputy Bruce Lourie, and that Lourie’s “sadistic violence” was part of an ongoing pattern.
Indeed, a department investigation into that day’s events found that Lourie had no training on the weapon.
And the county was a defendant in the case precisely because it failed to conduct a proper review of Lourie’s employment history. The suit alleges that before he was hired by the county in 2002, Lourie had been suspended by the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) where he’d been employed as a police officer, for “egregious misconduct involving dishonesty to a superior, attempts to persuade colleagues to lie to cover for his misconduct, for his own dishonesty, and for abusing members of the public and falsely accusing an arrested individual of a crime by planting evidence.”
An ongoing criminal investigation into Lourie’s actions remains open, but his attorneys aren’t hopeful for a satisfying resolution on that front.
“The assaults on Mr. Sanders’s rights continue because the so-called special prosecutor refuses to comply with Marsy’s Law and communicate with him or his counsel as the purported investigation of Deputy Bruce Lourie is stalled and drags on,” Chandra told Scene. “And the most disgusting thing of all is that Lourie is still entrusted with a badge and gun because Cuyahoga County leaders continue to fail to hold him or anyone else accountable for what happened to Mr. Sanders. They literally wrote into the settlement agreement that they don’t have to do anything, even though Lourie fired the beanbag gun without cause and contrary to any protocols. So the lack of accountability by Cuyahoga County is willful at this point.”
CONTENT WARNING: Sanders shared a photo of his eye in the aftermath of the injury. It is, to put it lightly, grisly.
Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed
This article appears in Sep 6-19, 2023.
