Ex-Weirton cop attains settlement over dismissal
Firing stemmed from his failure to shoot suicidal man wielding gun in domestic dispute
Stephen Mader, a former Weirton, W.Va., police officer who became a national figure after he claimed he was fired because he chose to not shoot a suicidal man with a gun in 2016, settled his federal wrongful termination lawsuit against the city recently, he said this weekend.
In an agreement approved by a federal judge on Feb. 1, Mr. Mader agreed to end the lawsuit in return for $175,000 from the city — $85,000 of it going to his attorneys — and a pledge by the city that it would not interfere with any attempt by him to get another job in law enforcement.
“I’m happy to get this behind me and look forward and start looking toward more opportunities,” Mr. Mader, 27, a Marine veteran who has been working as a truck driver to support his wife and two young sons since he was fired, saidin an interview Saturday in his attorneys’ office in Downtown Pittsburgh.
City Manager Travis Blosser said Sunday that Weirton’s insurance carrier was the one that made the decision to settle, but city officials feel similarly to Mr. Mader.
“I think from our perspective we’re incredibly happy to see the matter over,” he said.
The settlement came after months of discovery and the depositions of three members of the Weirton Police Department — including the chief and the officer who did shoot and kill the suicidal man — that revealed much more about what took place in Weirton in the aftermath of one of the few officer-involved shootings in the city’s history.
Tim O’Brien, Mr. Mader’s lead attorney, said from the documents and depositions, “it was clear that Mr. Mader was fired for the reason that we said in the lawsuit. It was also clear the other reasons that the municipality claimed supported that decision were not true.”
“It was clear the reason Mr. Mader was fired was because he decided not to shoot and kill an individual who he concluded did not pose a threat to himself or others. What Mr. Mader did was to honor and comply with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment,” Mr. O’Brien said.
Mr. Blosser disagreed, saying that the city still “feels that we were correct in our decision” to fire Mr. Mader. “I think we made the right decision.”
The city originally claimed Mr. Mader — a probationary officer hired in July 2015 — was fired because of two prior incidents, neither of which resulted in any suspensions and he was never told they were serious enough that he could be fired.
He was verbally warned in one of the cases, a dispute over a parking ticket in which Mr. Mader used profanity, which the city had claimed was a reason why it was so serious. In the other case, Mr. Mader was accused of contaminating a crime scene by not recognizing a possible homicide of an elderly woman who police were initially told had died of natural causes. In that case, police Chief Rob Alexander had recommended a suspension, but that recommendation was never followed through on.
The shooting that led to Mr. Mader’s firing did not grab national attention when it was first revealed.
It began as a relatively common domestic dispute call in the early morning of Saturday, May 6, 2016, at a small home on Marie Avenue in Weirton.
A woman who was the former girlfriend of R.J. Williams, 23, called 911 and said they had been fighting and he was threatening to kill himself. The former couple also had a toddler who was in the home with them at the time.
Mr. Mader was the first to respond and found Mr. Williams standing in front of the home with a handgun.
Mr. Williams told him to “just shoot me,” but Mr. Mader later said he believed Mr. Williams intended to commit “suicide by cop,” and he told Mr. Williams he would not shoot him and he was hoping to calm him down. The investigation would later find that Mr. Williams’ gun was unloaded.
But in the midst of that, two other officers — both veterans of the force — showed up and Mr. Williams began aiming the gun at them, too. In a matter of seconds, one of those officers, Ryan Kuzma, an 11-year veteran of the force, shot at Mr. Williams, striking him in the head, killing him instantly.
There was little coverage of the incident at the time, in part because the Pennsylvania State Police — which was immediately appointed to investigate the officer-involved shooting, as is typical there — only put out a 60word press release about the shooting and it did not say who was killed. No one involved — from the city police, to state police, the county prosecutor or the medical examiner — would reveal Mr. Williams’ name for three days.
At the time, the national debate over police killing suspects — in particular white officers killing black men — was near its height, with the Black Lives Matter movement gaining national attention almost weekly. Even then, after it was revealed that Mr. Williams was black, his death grabbed little attention outside the region.
But then, on June 8, Hancock County Prosecutor Jim Davis called a press conference to announce an investigation had cleared Officer Kuzma of any wrongdoing.
During that press conference, when asked by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette how the three officers involved in the shooting were doing, Chief Alexander said they were all fine and back at work.
When Mr. Mader read that, he was incensed. The day before, on June 7, he had been served notice that he was being fired and he knew what Chief Alexander said was not true.
After struggling to find a lawyer to represent him, Mr. Mader called the Post-Gazette in August to tell his story.
The story that ran in the Post-Gazette on Sept. 11, 2017, grabbed national attention. It was quickly picked up by representatives of the Black Lives Matter movement.
It also led to one of the many strange twists in Mr. Mader’s story.
Two days after the story ran, Officer Kuzma, who initially had been supportive of Mr. Mader, texted him and called him a “coward” for failingto shoot Mr. Williams.
On the next day, Sept. 14, after Mr. Mader did not respond to the text, Officer Kuzma, who was on the job in his police uniform, confronted Mr. Mader at the truck driving school where he was getting his commercial drivers license to start a new job.
Officer Kuzma was angry and regularly used profanities — something Mr. Mader’s attorneys noted did not result in any discipline — when he told Mr. Mader again that he was a coward. Stranger still, Officer Kuzma secretly recorded the confrontation on his cell phone that he kept hidden in his front shirt pocket. The video was given to Mr. Mader’s attorneys in discovery.
During that confrontation, Officer Kuzma reminded Mr. Mader that immediately after the shooting on May 6 he had asked Mr. Mader why he didn’t shoot Mr. Williams, and Mr. Mader said: “I don’t know.”
In reply, Officer Kuzma said, “You’re a psychic?” And he questioned whether Mr. Mader knew what Mr. Williams’ intended to do.
Mr. Mader explained to him: “The reason why I said, ‘I don’t know’ is because you had just shot a kid. I didn’t want to put it on your conscience if the kid said, ‘Just shoot me.’”
What is odd about Officer Kuzma and the department’s response throughout the case is that Mr. Mader never thought that what Officer Kuzma did — shooting Mr. Williams — was wrong because he had not had the interaction with Mr. Williams that he did.
“You have to look at it as two individual incidents,” Mr. Mader told the Post-Gazette, referring to how he read Mr. Williams’ intentions and how Officer Kuzma read them.
Other strange twists were revealed in the discovery in depositions:
• Officer Kuzma said that at one point after the shooting, a Weirton dispatcher told him that Mr. Williams’ former girlfriend wanted to give him a gift because the ex-girlfriend heard Officer Kuzma was “having a bad time.” Mr. Mader said the former girlfriend never reached out to him, though he did hear from Mr. Williams’ family, who wanted to thank him for not shooting Mr. Williams.
• Officer Kuzma in his deposition, and to Mr. Mader in their confrontation, said he thought Mr. Mader could have “tackled” Mr. Williams if he thought he was not a harm to himself or others. But Officer Kuzma, who is a K-9 officer, said he decided not to use his police dog on Mr. Williams because he would never deploy his dog at a “deadly threat.”
• Though the city and Chief Alexander complained of death threats and angry phone calls that they received after Mr. Mader went public with his story, Chief Alexander said the threatening phone messages were all lost when the city changed phone systems last year.
• In addition to the formal documents that the city gave to Mr. Mader when they told him he was going to be fired, the city also submitted in discovery a letter written by Lt. Eric Patterson and signed by Officer Kuzma and the two other officers who worked with Mr. Mader the night of the shooting. The letter expressed “a lack of confidence” in Mr. Mader and asked that they no longer work with him because they feared he would put their lives “in danger.” But the letter was undated and no one was able to specify when the letter was written.
Though Officer Kuzma, Chief Alexander and Lt. Patterson were all deposed before the settlement was reached, more depositions would have taken place if the case had gone on.
Mr. Mader’s attorneys, which included the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia, hoped those additional depositions would answer one big, lingering question: What led the city to decide to begin the process of firing Mr. Mader after it initially was so supportive of him.
“It seemed like everyone on the force was there for me,” Mr. Mader said about the days after the shooting. “But as soon as I received the letter [10 days after the shooting telling me they were considering action against me], it was like I was cut off.”
At some point in those 10 days, “there was a shift,” said Maggie Coleman, one of Mr. Mader’s attorneys. The city decided “somebody had to go down and it was Stephen.”
Mr. O’Brien, Mr. Mader’s lead attorney, believes the reason is because the city decided it needed to find a way to further justify Officer Kuzma’s decision to shoot Mr. Williams.
Exactly when that happened is not clear, but Mr. O’Brien said: “It might be when the family [of R.J. Williams] first notified the city that they were going to pursue a claim.”
Mr. Blosser, the Weirton city manager, said that is “extreme speculation,” and it was not true that the city decided to fire Mr. Mader because it feared it would be suedby Mr. Williams’ family.
Mr. Williams’ family has not filed a lawsuit against the city, and their attorney did not reply to a message left for him.
For Mr. Mader, the money he’ll get in the settlement will help, but it won’t change his life, he said. He will continue to serve in the Army National Guard part time and work as a regional truck driver, a job that keeps him away from his family for five days a week.
“I’m willing to make that sacrifice to keep my family there” in Weirton, where his and his wife’s families still reside, he said.
Though the case is ended, Mr. O’Brien said he learned enough to believe that Mr. Mader would have done well in a jury trial.
“I think a jury would have understood an injustice was committed” when Mr. Mader wasfired, Mr. O’Brien said.