Denver council approves $450,000 settlement with family of shooting victim
The Denver City Council approved a resolution Monday night sending a $450,000 payment to the estate of Jalonte Jones, an 18-year-old shooting victim who passed away after Denver Police Department officers failed to render aid.
One of those officers, DeWayne Rodgers, 16-year veteran of the force, was fired after an Internal Affairs review of the incident.
Jones was shot Sept. 7, 2020 in what his mother believes was an argument over a girl.
"The part that bothers me the most is that when the officers showed up, they were supposed to be there to help my child," Dedranette Jones told CBS News Colorado more than a year later, "and (Rodgers) essentially stood there and watched him die. Like, what kind of person are you?"
DPD released Rodgers's bodycam video from the incident. In it, Rodgers continues to press Jones, who is lying in a parking lot, for information.
"Where were you coming from?" Rodgers asks.
"I'm dying," Jones replied.
"I got an ambulance coming for you, are you gonna answer any questions, or no?" Rodgers continued.
The video shows paramedics arrived 14 minutes after Rodgers.
"They were the first people to even try to do CPR. To even touch my son," Dedranette Jones said. "The roughest part was the fact that I had sat for a little over a year, thinking that my son had died at the hospital, and to see this body cam and to know the last thing he said was, 'I'm dying', and essentially, he was dead in that parking lot before paramedics got to him. By the time paramedics got to him, he didn't actually have a pulse."
Rodgers told investigators he couldn't locate the bullet wound and feared aggravating the injury. However, in their report, investigators determined that Rodgers, "knew the general location of the wound from the blood saturation and had ample time to locate the wound. Yet, he made no additional effort to locate the wound..."
Additionally, "Officer Rodgers' claim that he was concerned about aggravating the injury cannot excuse the lack of care he demonstrated since the foreseeable outcome of failing to render aid was death, which significantly outweighs any concern of aggravating an injury."
