Aurora man files civil rights complaint after ‘less lethal’ APD encounter left him seriously injured

AURORA | Two years after an Aurora police officer shot a bean bag projectile through the abdomen of a man during an arrest, the man is suing the city, claiming police used excessive force and violated his Fourth Amendment rights.

Shawn Meredith was involved in a domestic dispute with his then-fiance in June 2021 that led to Aurora Police Department officers being called to his room at the InTown Suites extended-stay motel.

Police ultimately used a Taser on Meredith during a confrontation that followed and shot him from a few feet away with two bean-bag rounds, one of which penetrated his torso and had to be surgically removed.

According to the complaint filed in federal district court on Tuesday, Meredith lost his job and became homeless after the arrest and now suffers from gastrointestinal problems, chronic pain and night terrors as a result. Dan Williams, an attorney for Meredith, described Meredith’s treatment at the hands of Aurora police as part of a larger pattern of abuse.

“If someone does something (the police) don’t like, even when they know they have no legal right to compel an action, they’re unwilling to deescalate a situation or take the required steps and instead they’ll just use all the force to get immediate compliance,” Williams said. “It’s a police tactic that led to this incident in Aurora and incidents around the country.”

The complaint names Aurora police sergeant Brandon Samuels and officers Steven Evans and Steven Gerdjikian, as well as the city itself, as defendants.

Ryan Luby, a city spokesman said in an email that the city could not comment on the case before it was filed or served. Police spokeswoman Faith Goodrich said the department did not have anything to add to Luby’s statement.

The Sentinel submitted a request for criminal justice and internal affairs records related to the case to the Aurora Police Department on Monday.

The Sentinel evaluated the complaint, body-worn camera footage shared by Williams and an investigative report prepared by chief deputy district attorney Clinton McKinzie of the 18th Judicial District to better understand the incident.

The sources differ in the precise telling of the events that led up to the violent encounter with Meredith. According to the complaint, Meredith’s fiance said she and Meredith got into an argument that escalated into a “physical altercation” which ended when Meredith pushed her out of the room.

Meredith’s fiance then called her grandmother and contacted police for help getting back into the room so she could retrieve her belongings. Police met Meredith’s fiance in the parking lot and “observed she had some scratches and scrapes.”

Officers decided to confront Meredith, who was still in the motel room, according to the complaint. They tried to coax him out, knowing they needed a warrant to enter the room, but Meredith refused to open the door. Eventually, the police began warning Meredith that they would force the door open if he wouldn’t come outside voluntarily.

Body-worn camera footage that Williams said was captured from the perspective of Samuels appears to show the sergeant discussing how officers might “boot the door” of Meredith’s room to arrest him, even though they would have lacked a warrant.

After about 20 minutes of talking with Meredith through the door of his room, the officers were becoming “visibly frustrated,” according to the complaint.

“Having had their request for Mr. Meredith to go into the hallway for a voluntary interview declined, defendants could have followed the constitutional path, stopped trying to gain entry to the room, and secured a warrant,” the complaint said.

“Instead, however, they continued to argue with Mr. Meredith, alternating between being threatening and suggesting that they could help Mr. Meredith avoid prosecution for a felony if he opened the door.”

The officers talked about using a ram to break down the door until a hotel manager arrived and tried to unlock the door with a master key. When that didn’t work, the manager rammed his shoulder into the door and broke it open.

Illustrating the discrepancies between the three sources, the complaint describes the manager taking “several” tries to break the door with the “tacit approval” of officers, while the body-worn camera footage shows the manager taking just two tries as officers stood by passively. McKinzie’s report merely says that the manager broke the door open “abruptly,” noting that the officers present “had not requested (the manager) to force the door.”

Once the door was breached, the complaint says officers found Meredith standing about 20 feet from the doorway with “a metal object in each hand.” Police told Meredith to “drop the weapon,” and after hesitating, he dropped the two objects.

Officers ordered Meredith to come toward them, all while pointing their weapons at him, and after hesitating for several minutes, Meredith approached the now-broken doorway. 

“While he did so, three officers were there, with Defendant Gerdjikian pointing a shotgun and Defendant Samuels pointing a Taser at him at close range,” the complaint reads. “A short time later, as he had been requested to do repeatedly throughout the encounter, Mr. Meredith took a step forward and almost, but did not quite, exit the room.”

Body-worn camera footage shows Meredith leaning his upper body backward and extending his leg toward the doorway and Samuels. The McKinzie report characterized this movement as “a quick step,” while Williams later said Meredith was trying to exit the room “gingerly.”

“They had been, for about 25 minutes, telling him to come out of the room. So he was, after a lot of back and forth, doing what they asked him to do,” Williams said.

It was at that point that Samuels shot Meredith with a Taser. Meredith appeared mostly unaffected and lowered his right arm, which had been folded over his chest. Gerdjikian then shot him in the stomach from about four feet away with a bean-bag round — a small fabric bag containing lead pellets, fired from a shotgun like an ordinary shell.

Bean-bag ammunition is advertised as a “less lethal” alternative to slugs and buckshot, though the rounds can and have caused deaths. In Meredith’s case, one of the bean bags deployed during the incident, which would have been traveling through the air at about 270 feet per second, pierced his flesh and became lodged inside of his abdomen, requiring surgery later to remove.

Once shot with the first bean bag, Meredith “attempted to deescalate the situation” by pointing to a knife clipped to the front left pocket of his pants and urging officers to take it from him, the complaint and body-worn camera footage indicated. Gerdjikian shot him again with a bean bag. After this, Evans took Meredith’s knife and tossed it on the ground.

Evans then dragged Meredith out of the room by the arm and threw him into the wall on the opposite side of the hallway. Once Meredith was on the ground, Samuels again used his Taser on the plaintiff “for no apparent reason other than to inflict additional pain,” according to the complaint.

After Meredith was handcuffed, the complaint states, he lost consciousness and became unresponsive. Body-worn camera footage shows officers trying to speak to Meredith as he begins breathing irregularly, followed by officers trying and failing to find his pulse. Eventually, he appears to regain consciousness somewhat and paramedics transport him out of the building.

The complaint asserts that Meredith’s heart stopped during the incident and that he was only revived after an officer performed a “chest massage,” apparently referring to a sternal rub, which is used to test a person’s responsiveness to pain. The McKinzie report also said the officers were forced to perform “life-saving procedures” and radioed for medical help.

“Eventually, after Officer (Caroline) Keevey performed a chest massage, Mr. Meredith cameback to life,” the complaint reads.

The McKinzie report includes additional details of what allegedly happened between the forcing of the motel room door and Samuels’ initial decision to shoot Meredith with a Taser that were absent from the complaint and excluded from the footage shared by Williams.

According to the DA’s office, the “objects” held by Meredith when officers breached the door were collapsible metal batons, which he “extended … as if preparing to fight the officers.” Meredith’s fiance had reportedly told police downstairs that Meredith may have been planning to fight them with his “bang sticks.”

The report also said officers were concerned about Meredith reaching for something on the top of the refrigerator, where his right hand was located as he stood inside of the doorway, and that earlier Meredith had warned them to “back up, because this will not turn nice” and threatened to “arm” himself while holding the batons.

When interviewed later by investigators, according to the report, Meredith said he only took the batons out to show that they weren’t guns and said they had “accidentally” extended, though officers allegedly told him to drop the weapons at least a dozen times before he complied.

Meredith also said he didn’t want to fight with officers but admitted to investigators that, at one point, he had considered whether he wanted to “create an all-out war.”

In the complaint, Meredith was said to have passed out on the way to the hospital, woken up having a severe coughing fit and vomited several times. That night, surgeons operated to remove the bean bag that pierced Meredith’s abdomen and traveled toward his hip. After nine days in the hospital, he was released onto the streets.

“Forced to convalesce in a homeless state, Mr. Meredith subsequently had to haul his belongings with him even while injured,” the complaint states. “Shortly thereafter, he had to return to the hospital and seek care in the emergency room because of his ‘worsening abdominal wound.’”

A computerized tomography scan revealed bleeding in his abdomen, which was later diagnosed as a muscle tear. According to the complaint, Meredith suffered long-term medical complications as a result of the arrest, including “extreme and chronic pain,” burn scars on his midriff where he was shocked with the Taser, night terrors and gastrointestinal problems.

“The damage caused by Defendants firing a less-lethal round into Mr. Meredith’s midsection have also included Mr. Meredith losing control of his bowels,” the complaint says. “The condition is so extreme that he cannot use a urinal without defecating on himself. He suffers the ongoing humiliation of inadequate bowel control.”

Meredith is also reportedly unable to return to work as a truck driver because of the extent of his injuries. Williams said his client was charged with two misdemeanor assault charges but that the charges were eventually dropped. A search of statewide court records did not show any charges or convictions resulting from the 2021 incident.

McKinzie ultimately found that the Aurora officers’ use of force was “justified.” However, many of the details revealed in the report were cited in the 2023 complaint as proof that the responding officers had violated Meredith’s constitutional rights.

The complaint lists numerous examples of excessive force lawsuits settled by Aurora police and describes the findings of the Colorado Attorney General’s Office’s investigation into the department, which included the conclusion that officers regularly used excessive force.

Williams insists that Meredith did not pose a threat and was not trying to flee when officers decided to use force against him.

“At the time when Defendants Samuels, Gerdjikian and Evans used excessive force, plaintiff had a clearly established constitutional right under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution to be secure from unreasonable seizure through excessive force,” the complaint says.

The decision of officers to shoot Meredith with a bean bag round while he was standing just a few feet away was also criticized in the complaint. The specific ammunition used — two Safariland Defense Technology 12-Gauge Drag-Stabilized Rounds — had a minimum safe distance of 20 feet, according to the McKinzie report.

The same report notes that Gerdjikian did not know the specific brand of ammunition used in the shotgun, though police said their less-lethal shotguns were typically loaded with a bean-bag round made by Combined Tactical Systems that does not have a minimum safe distance.

“It is … beyond the scope of this review to determine how the Safariland Defense Technology rounds came to be in a less-lethal shotgun that is normally used with Combined Tactical System rounds,” McKinzie wrote.

“The investigation did find that the less-lethal shotgun that was handed to Officer Gerdikian contained eight Safariland Defense Technology rounds and one Combined Tactical System round.”

Meredith’s complaint also describes allegations of warrantless and illegal seizures by Aurora police that led to settlements, including the 2015 case of Dwight Crews, in which Gerdjikian was named among the defendants.

Crews, a 60-year-old disabled man, was thrown to the ground after being ordered out of his home by Gerdjikian and another officer, who did not have a warrant for Crews’ arrest, according to Crews’ lawsuit. The American Civil Liberties Union announced in 2018 that the city was settling with Crews for $35,000.

Meredith’s complaint stresses the fact that officers did not have a warrant when they entered his motel room and said the plaintiff had “a clearly established constitutional right under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution to be secure in his person from unreasonable searches and seizures, including warrantless entry into his residence.”

Samuels was separately accused of being aware of and “acquiesc(ing) in the constitutional violations committed by his subordinates.” The complaint also alleges that officers violated Meredith’s right under the state constitution to not be subject to excessive force or illegal seizures.

All three of the officers named as defendants in the case were included on a roster of current Aurora Police Department employees turned over to the Sentinel in January.

Meredith is demanding that the defendants compensate him for medical bills and lost wages as well as the pain and suffering caused by the incident. Williams said they had not committed to asking for a specific amount of money but that the request would be comparable to the $7 million settlement reached between the city of Idaho Springs and Michael Clark last year.

Williams said in a news release shared with the Sentinel that it was important that the public “never grow numb to this type of police violence no matter how often the story repeats itself.”

“The grossly disproportionate force used in this case nearly cost Mr. Meredith his life,” he said. “It is shocking but not surprising that Aurora, with a significant history of violating the rights of those they are sworn to protect, once again needs to be held to account for brutalizing a resident of the community.”