$4.65 Million Settlement After West Seneca Police Shot Unarmed Buffalo Man Behind the Ear
Won by Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria.
Town of West Seneca's insurers paid $4.65 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit after police shot unarmed Buffalo man Jeffrey Edwards behind the ear in 2010, leaving him quadriplegic until his death four years later.
What happened
On April 25, 2010, Jeffrey J. Edwards drove to the West Seneca home of his friend Jerome Brylski to drop off food. What Edwards did not know was that West Seneca police had Brylski's house under surveillance. Officers considered Brylski unstable and believed he had threatened to shoot anyone who came to his door. Edwards, unarmed and unaware of any danger, was caught in the middle of that police response.
When officers opened fire, one bullet struck Edwards behind the left ear. He crawled out of his car with his hands outstretched, but the damage was done. The shot left Edwards paralyzed from the neck down. He spent the next four years as a quadriplegic before dying of heart failure in June 2014 at age 46.
Before his death, Edwards filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Town of West Seneca. Richard Weisbeck, a partner at Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria in Buffalo, represented Edwards and later his estate. The case went through multiple rounds of mediation.
In February 2016, the town's insurers agreed to pay $4.65 million to resolve the lawsuit. Town officials stressed that the payment came entirely from insurance funds, with no direct draw on taxpayer money. After attorneys' fees and reimbursements to Medicaid and Medicare for Edwards's long-term medical care, the estate netted close to $2.4 million.
The WIVB News 4 and Buffalo News both reported the settlement in February 2016, confirming Weisbeck's role and the insurance-funded resolution.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria
All Lipsitz Green Scime Cambria proven verdicts →An Erie County jury awarded $100 million to a woman sexually abused over four years beginning at age 12, the largest Child Victims Act verdict in New York State history.
A Monroe County jury ordered former Rochester Catholic priest Foster Rogers to pay $95 million to a man he sexually assaulted in 1979, when the victim was 15 years old, in one of the largest Child Victims Act verdicts in New York history.
An Erie County jury awarded $65 million to a woman who was sexually abused over seven years as a child by former Buffalo YMCA counselor James B. Jackson, in one of the largest verdicts under New York's Child Victims Act.
An Erie County jury awarded $30 million to a man who was sexually abused as a child by Rev. Douglas D. Thore, a Lutheran pastor in Marilla, NY, in what was reported as the largest Child Victims Act verdict in Western New York at the time.
Related civil rights verdicts
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.
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.