(CN) — A federal judge in Kansas ruled Tuesday that seven Wichita police officers are entitled to qualified immunity in a civil lawsuit over the in-custody death of a 17-year-old Cedric Lofton, who was restrained for more than half an hour at a juvenile detention center.
In his order, Chief U.S. District Judge Eric F. Melgren said the plaintiff, Marquan Teetz — Lofton’s brother — did not demonstrate the officers violated clearly established law. He granted the officer’s motion for summary judgment.
Melgren dismissed without prejudice claims for negligence, intentional infliction of emotional distress and negligent infliction of emotional distress against the Wichita police officers. These state law claims could be filed again.
Qualified immunity is a legal doctrine that protects officials from lawsuits, only allowing them when a clearly established constitutional right has been violated.
Andrew M. Stroth of the Chicago firm Action Injury Law Group, one of the plaintiff’s attorneys said they would continue to seek justice for Lofton.
“An unarmed 17-year-old Black boy was unjustifiably killed and we will do everything we can to support this family,” he said.
In his order, Melgren described the incident that led to Lofton’s death. In the early morning hours of Sept. 24, 2021, Officers Cory Bennett, Ryan O’Hare and Jordan Clayton of the Wichita Police Department found Lofton on the porch of his foster home. They observed him hallucinating and out of touch with reality, saying that people wanted to kill him, and believed he was showing symptoms of schizophrenia.
When they tried to take him to a hospital, he resisted, kicking some of the officers and attempting to bite them. The responding officers, which at that point included John Knolla, placed him in a WRAP restraining device.
Because they believed he had just committed several acts of assault on them, the officers took him to the Sedgwick County Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center (JIAC) instead of a hospital. After leaving him alone in a room there, detention center workers found that he had stopped breathing. He was taken to a hospital, where he died two days later.
Teetz sued on June 13, 2022, filed an amended complaint in November and a second amended complaint in April 2023. He claimed the Wichita officers were indifferent to Cedric’s mental health crisis in violation of his rights under the Constitution and said that the supervising officers, Tony Supancic, Amanda Darrow and John Esau participated in and did not stop violations of Lofton’s rights. Teetz also claimed the officers intentionally and negligently inflicted emotional distress.
“Plaintiff fails to carry his burden of demonstrating that involuntary hospitalization and issuance of a mental evaluation were clearly established constitutional rights that the WPD Officers’ deprived Lofton of when they took him to JIAC. Consequently, the WPD Officers are entitled to qualified immunity, and the Court grants the WPD Officers’ motion for summary judgment,” Melgren wrote in his order.
In the complaint, Teetz decried the use of the WRAP system, said the officers should have taken Lofton to the hospital rather than the Assessment Center, and condemned the actions of the Assessment Center officers.
“This foster child needed help. But rather than provide it, WPD officers physically confronted him, unnecessarily escalated a benign scenario, arrested him, and entombed him in a WRAP restraint system — effectively a full-body straitjacket,” Teetz says in the complaint. “Cedric died after several JIAC officers forced him to the floor in the prone position and pinned him on his stomach for 39 uninterrupted minutes until he stopped breathing.”
In early 2022, Sedgwick County District Attorney Marc Bennett said he would not bring any charges against the officers due to Kansas’ “stand-your-ground” law, the Associated Press reported at the time.
Various defendants have been dropped during the course of the case, including Sedgwick County and the city of Wichita.
Sedgwick County Juvenile Intake and Assessment Center Officers Jason Stepien; Brenton Newby, Karen Conklin, William Buckner and Benito Mendoza remained defendants in the suit as of Tuesday night. They, too, have filed for summary judgment.
Jeffrey M. Kuhlman of the Great Bend, Kansas, firm Watkins Calcara, one of the attorneys for the Assessment Center officers, declined to comment as Melgren’s order did not impact his clients. Attorneys for the Wichita officers did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday night.