$10 Million Settlement for Family of Andre Hill, Unarmed Man Shot by Columbus Police Holding a Cellphone
Won by Ben Crump Law.
A legal team led by Ben Crump negotiated a $10 million settlement between the City of Columbus and the family of Andre Hill, an unarmed 47-year-old Black man fatally shot by officer Adam Coy while walking out of a garage holding his cellphone. The city council's May 2021 approval made it the largest settlement in Columbus history.
What happened
Shortly before 2 a.m. on December 22, 2020, Columbus police officer Adam Coy responded to a non-emergency call about a man sitting in an SUV, repeatedly turning the engine on and off. Andre Hill, a 47-year-old Black man, was a guest at a house on the street and was walking out of the garage toward the officers, holding his cellphone in his left hand, when Coy shot him within seconds of encountering him. Hill was unarmed. For several minutes afterward, no officer on scene rendered first aid. He died at a nearby hospital.
Because Coy had not activated his body camera until after the shooting, the only footage of the encounter came from the camera's 60-second lookback buffer, which recorded video without audio, enough to show how quickly Coy fired and how little Hill had done to provoke it. The fallout was swift by the standards of police shootings: Coy was fired within days, and the city's mayor publicly apologized to Hill's family.
Hill's family retained Ben Crump, fresh off the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor cases, to lead their civil claim against the city. Rather than years of litigation, the case moved to resolution in under five months. On May 17, 2021, the Columbus City Council unanimously approved a $10 million settlement with Hill's family, the largest settlement of any kind in the city's history, and, as Crump noted at the time, the largest pretrial payment for a police use-of-force case in Ohio.
The settlement included a symbolic term alongside the money: the city agreed to rename the gymnasium at the Brentnell Community Recreation Center, where Hill had spent time, in his honor. The Hill family and their lawyers publicly credited city leaders for taking responsibility rather than forcing a grieving family through protracted litigation.
Accountability in the criminal courts came later. Coy was indicted for murder, and in November 2024 a Franklin County jury convicted him of murder in Hill's death; he was subsequently sentenced to prison. The Hill settlement stands as one of the clearest examples of the pattern Crump's national practice established in the early 2020s: pairing intense public advocacy with civil litigation to produce record-setting municipal settlements without a trial.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
- 1.NPR: City Of Columbus To Pay $10 Million In Settlement With Family Of Andre Hill (May 2021)·Archived copy
- 2.CNN: Columbus, Ohio, approves $10 million settlement to the family of Andre Hill·Archived copy
- 3.NBC4 WCMH-TV Columbus: City Council approves $10 million settlement with family of Andre' Hill·Archived copy
More proven verdicts from Ben Crump Law
All Ben Crump Law proven verdicts →Lewis Butler, a security guard, was shot eight times and killed in November 2023 during an armed robbery at an internet cafe in Havana, Florida. The cafe's operators had not reported a robbery three weeks earlier in which the gun used against him was stolen. In December 2025 a Gadsden County jury awarded his widow $779,389,024, including $550 million for pain and suffering and $225 million for loss of companionship.
A Leon County jury awarded $411,726,608 to Duane Washington, a career Army sergeant left partially paralyzed in a 45-vehicle pileup on Interstate 10 near Tallahassee, in the Second Judicial Circuit's first virtual jury trial. Ben Crump tried the damages case with co-counsel Robert Cox. Liability was entered by default after defendant Top Auto Express stopped responding in the litigation, its lawyer withdrew months before trial, the one-truck Pembroke Pines carrier sat out the Zoom trial undefended, and industry observers called the record number essentially uncollectable beyond the roughly $1 million in insurance that was offered and rejected before trial.
Ben Crump, with Connecticut co-counsel Louis Rubano and R.J. Weber, secured a $45 million settlement from the City of New Haven for Richard "Randy" Cox, who was left paralyzed from the chest down after being thrown headfirst into the wall of a police transport van while handcuffed. At announcement it was described as the largest settlement ever reached in a U.S. police-misconduct case, surpassing the George Floyd settlement.
Ben Crump, with co-counsel Antonio Romanucci and L. Chris Stewart, negotiated a $27 million settlement between the family of George Floyd and the City of Minneapolis, announced by the family's lawyers as the largest pretrial settlement of a civil rights wrongful-death claim in American history. The city council approved the payment unanimously in March 2021, while jury selection in Derek Chauvin's murder trial was underway blocks away.
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An Essex County jury awarded $165.97 million against the State of New Jersey and its Division of Youth and Family Services for failing to remove an infant from his home despite his grandmother's abuse report, a verdict reported as the largest in state personal injury history. The trial judge cut it to $102.6 million on remittitur, and in April 2017 the Appellate Division reversed the judgment entirely on qualified immunity grounds under the Tort Claims Act. The family collected nothing from the State.
On December 14, 2019 Emily Gaines, an 18-year-old Moore High School senior, was driving to take the ACT when Sgt. Kyle Lloyd of the Moore Police Department, off duty and rushing a key to another officer's patrol car for a department event, hit her broadside at 95 to 100 mph in a 50 zone. She died at the scene. On April 1, 2026 a federal jury returned $126,000,000. The court entered $90,000,000 against Lloyd, who is in prison, and cut the $36,000,000 against the City to $125,000 under Oklahoma's Governmental Tort Claims Act.
The Popham Law Firm secured a $57 million settlement on behalf of more than 1,700 Sprint employees who alleged the company's automated performance system unlawfully targeted workers over 40 during a series of mass layoffs, at the time the largest ADEA class settlement in the District of Kansas.
Terral Ellis II, 26, walked into the Ottawa County Jail voluntarily on an outstanding warrant. He developed bronchopneumonia and spent twelve days asking for medical care for seizures, sweating and pain. Jail video captured staff and the jail nurse mocking him. He died of septic shock on October 22, 2015.