A Hickory woman is suing the city and several current and former police officers for the 2023 death of her son, who was shot and killed after officers fired dozens of times as he fled from them on foot.
Two Charlotte-based law firms that specialize in police misconduct filed the lawsuit in Catawba County Superior Court last week.
Attorney Anthony Burts told Carolina Public Press that U.S. Supreme Court precedent dictates that police cannot use lethal force simply to prevent a non-threatening suspect from getting away.
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The U.S. Supreme Court decision Tennessee v. Garner established that under the Fourth Amendment — which protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures — law enforcement officers “may not seize an unarmed, nondangerous suspect by shooting him dead.”
“We need there to be appropriate law enforcement tactics being used in our communities,” Burts said.
“When deadly force is used and someone dies, that person is never coming back.”
The man at the center of the lawsuit is Timothy Setzer Jr., who was 27 and working in construction before his death. Police were responding to reports of gunfire near a park in downtown Hickory shortly after midnight when they spotted Setzer walking and talking to himself, the lawsuit said.
Setzer matched the description of a suspicious individual who dispatchers reported being seen in the area, according to the lawsuit. Hickory Police Officer Austin Steele ordered him to stop and show his hands. Setzer raised his hands in the air but continued to walk away from the officers. After being ordered to stop again, Setzer fled.
Steele and Officer Isam Shamseldin gave chase, following Setzer into a nearby empty parking lot. According to the lawsuit, that’s when the officers opened fire with Setzer’s back still turned to them.
A third officer, Aaron Travis, who had just arrived on the scene in a patrol car driven by his trainee also fired at Setzer out of the passenger-side window of his vehicle, the lawsuit said, calling the maneuver “more suited for an action movie or first-person shooter video game.”
Altogether the three Hickory officers fired 28 shots at Setzer and hit him 15 times, killing him on the spot, according to the complaint.
The officers stated in their initial incident reports that Setzer had a firearm and had pulled it out of his waistband before they opened fire, but the lawsuit said a body-worn camera footage acquired from the State Bureau of Investigation tells a different story.
“Body-worn camera footage confirms that (Setzer’s) back remained turned to Defendant Officers, and he never (1) stopped running, (2) brandished a weapon, or (3) made threats,” the complaint stated.
Travis admitted in a SBI interview following the shooting that he never saw Setzer with a weapon and that his back remained turned to Steele and Shamseldin as he was running away, the lawsuit said.
An autopsy showed Setzer was shot several times from behind, indicating he was not facing the officers when they opened fire, the lawsuit said.
Further, the complaint alleged that the Hickory police officers never gave Setzer a verbal warning that they would use deadly force before they started shooting. Burts said violated the city's use-of-force policy, which states that officers, when determining whether to use deadly force, should give a verbal warning “when feasible.”
No gun was found on Setzer’s person after the incident, but an SBI agent found a firearm in a wooded area near the parking lot using a 3-D scanner. SBI investigators also recovered an empty handgun magazine allegedly belonging to Setzer, although the lawsuit maintains that there is no physical evidence, including fingerprints, DNA or gunshot residue, linking it to Setzer.
“Unequivocally, there was no gun on Mr. Setzer’s person,” Burts told CPP.
Burts said he filed a petition to release the body-worn camera footage of the incident. Under North Carolina law, such footage is not a public record and requires a court order to be released.
“We want the public to be able to weigh in because Mr. Setzer is no longer here and never will be able to say what happened himself,” Burts said.
The lawsuit brings claims against three Hickory police officers — Steele, Shamseldin and Travis — for their use of deadly force, which it claims was unreasonable, excessive and violated Setzer's Fourth Amendment rights.
The primary argument of the lawsuit is that Setzer was unarmed and nondangerous at the time of his death. Even if the firearm found near the site of the shooting had belonged to Setzer, that he did not have it on his person and that he didn’t threaten the officers should be enough to constitute excessive force, Burts said.
The complaint also brings state-law claims against the officers and the City of Hickory for assault and battery, wrongful death and negligence.
Hickory City Manager Warren Wood, who is cited in the complaint as the official who reviewed the shooting and determined it to be in compliance with the city’s use of force policy, did not respond to CPP’s request for comment before the publication of this article.
Neither Travis nor Shamseldin have active law enforcement certifications in North Carolina, according to the NC Justice Training and Certification Portal. The circumstances or timeline of their departures from the Hickory Police Department is unclear.
Steele still has an active certification associated with Hickory P.D. A public information officer with the department did not respond to a request for comment prior to the publication of this article.
This article first appeared on Carolina Public Press and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.