Cook County Jury Awards $1.5 Million Over Chicago Police Shooting Death of Matthias Mayhorn, 28
After trial: The Chicago Reporter's database of city police misconduct payments lists $1.5 million paid in this case. We could not retrieve the Cook County docket or any appellate record, so post-trial motions and appeals are unconfirmed.
Won by Power Rogers LLP.
On March 10, 2009, two plainclothes Chicago officers went to Matthias Mayhorn's home to arrest him on a domestic investigative alert, and one of them shot him as he tried to leave through a second-floor window. In May 2015 a Cook County jury found the shooting unjustified and the officers willful and wanton, and awarded his estate $1.5 million against the City of Chicago and both officers. A city payout database lists $1.5 million paid in the case.
What happened
Matthias Mayhorn was 28 and unemployed when two plainclothes Chicago police officers, Patrick Kane and Henry Thomas, came to his home on March 10, 2009. They had an investigative alert to arrest him over a domestic incident. Mayhorn ran to his second-floor bedroom and tried to get out through the window.
The officers grabbed him by the legs as he went. The officers said Mayhorn pulled a gun while they held him by the feet, and that they shot him when he would not drop it. He was hit in the head and in the leg. The head wound killed him almost at once.
His father, Glenn Mayhorn, sued as special administrator of the estate, naming the City of Chicago, Kane and Thomas. The case, No. 2009-L-013503, went to trial in the Circuit Court of Cook County before Judge James M. Varga. It ran about two weeks, with Assistant Corporation Counsel Matthew A. Hurd, Scott J. Jebson, James F. Ormond and Barrett Boudreaux defending the City and the officers.
The central dispute was where Mayhorn was when he was shot. The defense said it happened at the window, in a close struggle. Larry R. Rogers Jr., Sean M. Houlihan and Carolyn Daley Scott put on forensic evidence that the wounds ran downward and forward, which pointed to a shot fired from above after Mayhorn had already reached the gangway below the window. The experts' point was that the officers' account of a close-range struggle at the window did not fit the physical evidence. On that account he was not a threat of imminent death or serious harm to the officers or anyone else when he was shot.
The jury, seven men and five women, deliberated for two days. On May 21, 2015, it found the shooting unjustified, found the defendants willful and wanton, and returned a wrongful death verdict of $1.5 million for the estate. The award was meant to compensate Mayhorn's young children for losing their father.
The Chicago Reporter's database of city police misconduct payments lists $1.5 million in payments in this case. The Cook County docket and any post-trial rulings could not be retrieved, so the record we reviewed does not show whether an appeal was filed.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
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