The adoptive mother of a Black teenager with special needs filed a lawsuit against the city of Burlington, claiming police officers used excessive force when they arrested her son after he allegedly stole a handful of vape pens in 2021.
The civil action, filed on Jan. 30 in Vermont Superior Court, will be handled by the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, along with the New York City branch of Latham & Watkins, an international law firm, with help from the MacArthur Justice Center, which specializes in police misconduct cases.
The suit seeks unspecified punitive damages and calls for anti-bias training for officers, as well as a policy that would ban the city’s emergency personnel from using ketamine on anyone who may be experiencing a mental health episode.
At the core of the lawsuit are allegations that Burlington officers “needlessly escalated” when they confronted Cathy Austrian’s 14-year-old son, while paramedics showed up later and injected the boy with ketamine — the same sedative that killed Elijah McClain in a similar encounter with Colorado police officers in 2019, despite the 23-year-old having committed no crime.
In that case, two paramedics were convicted in December of criminally negligent homicide after a jury determined they administered the drug that caused McClain to go into cardiac arrest before he died three days later.
The Burlington case, meanwhile, has reignited a national debate over police use of force nearly four years after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd during a 2020 arrest, leading to nationwide calls for police reforms and racial justice.
Austrian alleges that the actions of the officers and emergency responders amounted to racial discrimination against her son, while the incident underscored the pressing need for more police oversight in Burlington, the filing says.
“I’m committed to this because of my family,” she told Seven Days, an independent alt-weekly…
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