(Reuters) – The family of an 11-year-old boy shot by a Mississippi police officer will keep pursuing a civil lawsuit and push for body-camera footage of the encounter to be publicly released, the family’s lawyer said on Friday, a day after a grand jury decided against recommending criminal charges in the case.
Indianola Officer Greg Capers shot unarmed Aderrien Murry in the chest at the boy’s home early one morning in May, after the 11-year-old called police to his home because his father was threatening his mother.
A grand jury decided not to indict Capers on Thursday, finding that he had no criminal intent when he shot Murry. But still pending is a civil lawsuit that the Murrys filed in May against Capers, the city of Indianola, and its police chief, seeking $5 million in damages for Capers’ alleged “reckless disregard” for the Murrys’ rights and safety.
Murry survived, but his medical bills are in the tens of thousands of dollars, “and the city has never offered to help with those,” his lawyer Carlos Moore said in an interview on Friday. Moore said the city has still not responded to the Murrys’ proposed settlement.
The lawyer representing the city and its officers in the civil lawsuit did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday.
The Indianola Police Department referred a request for comment to the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office, which said in a statement that it would not take further criminal action in the matter after the grand jury’s decision.
The magistrate judge overseeing the civil lawsuit allowed Moore and Murry’s mother to view body-camera footage of the shooting last week, but prohibited them from publicly releasing the video.
They appealed that decision to a higher judge, who could issue a decision early next year, according to Moore.
(This story has been refiled to remove garbled text in paragraph 1)
(Reporting by Julia Harte)
