IOWA CITY, Iowa — An insurance company for the City of Cedar Rapids will pay $8 million to a Black motorist who was paralyzed after a white police officer shot him during a 2016 traffic stop.
The payout will settle a long-running lawsuit brought by Jerime Mitchell over a shooting that had exposed tensions between Black residents and authorities in Iowa’s second largest city.
Cedar Rapids had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees defending against the lawsuit and arguing that Officer Lucas Jones acted lawfully in shooting Mitchell in 2016.
Jones was fired from the department in June 2020 for “violating department policy.”
The agreement to settle dismisses the lawsuit's claims with no acknowledgment of fault or liability.
The settlement is subject to city council approval, according to the Cedar Rapids Gazette.
The resolution avoids a trial that had been scheduled to begin Tuesday, as the nation awaits a verdict in the trial of a Minneapolis police officer charged with killing George Floyd.