Family of Colorado Man Killed by Police Gets $19M Settlement

The parents of a 22-year-old Colorado man killed by a sheriff’s deputy while suffering a mental health crisis will get $19 million from government state and local agencies and changes to how officers are trained, under a settlement announced Tuesday.

The shooting of Christian Glass after his SUV became stuck in the mountain town of Silver Plume last year drew national attention and prompted calls to reform how authorities respond to people with mental health problems.

As part of the settlement, Sally and Simon Glass also negotiated for changes they hope will prevent another family from suffering a loss like theirs. Clear Creek County will establish a crisis response team and its sheriff’s office will train and certify all deputies in crisis intervention, according to documents released by their attorneys.

The state of Colorado, which had three officers on the scene of Glass’s June 11, 2022 killing, in addition to those from local agencies, will create a virtual reality training scenario for the Colorado State Patrol based on the shooting that will focus on de-escalation in stressful situations involving officers from different agencies.

The settlement, which the communities of Georgetown and Idaho Springs also joined, is the largest for a police killing in Colorado, topping the $15 million settlement reached in 2021 for the death of Elijah McClain, and also ranks among the top in the United States, Rathod said. His law firm, Rathod Mohamedbhai LLC, also represented the mother of McClain, a 23-year-old Black man who died in 2019 after police in the Denver suburb of Aurora forcibly restrained him and a paramedic injected him with the powerful sedative ketamine.

Former Clear Creek County sheriff’s deputy Andrew Buen, who shot Glass, and his supervisor, former Sgt. Kyle Gould, are both being prosecuted in Glass’s death. A grand jury found they needlessly escalated the standoff after he called 911 for help. Gould was not at the scene but was watching events unfold on body camera footage and authorized officers to remove Glass from his vehicle, according to court documents.

Glass, whose car became stuck on a dirt road, initially told the dispatcher that he was being followed and made other statements which the indictment said showed he was paranoid, hallucinating or delusional and experiencing a mental health crisis.

Officers’ body camera footage showed Glass refusing to get out of his car.

After roughly an hour of negotiations, officers decided to breach the car even though there was no indication that Glass posed a danger or was suspected of a crime, according to the grand jury.

Once the window was smashed, body camera footage shows officers peppering Glass with bean bag rounds, then tasing him. Glass brandished a knife in “a state of complete panic and self-defense” before twisting in his seat to thrust a knife in an officer’s direction, according to the grand jury. Buen then fired his gun five times into Glass.

The grand jury found that at no point was the other officer in “imminent danger of being stabbed by Mr. Glass.”

“But for the decision by Gould to remove Mr. Glass from the vehicle there is no reason to believe that Mr. Glass would have been a danger to any law enforcement personnel, to himself, or to any member of the public,” the indictment said.

Body camera footage doesn’t show officers from other agencies — including the Colorado State Patrol, gaming division, and police from the nearby towns of Idaho Springs and Georgetown — attempting to stop the breach of the vehicle.