Appeals court reverses dismissal of excessive force lawsuit against Greensboro officer who fatally shot teenager

GREENSBORO, N.C. (WGHP) — An appeals court has ruled that a district court should not have dismissed a lawsuit against a Greensboro police officer in the shooting death of a teen during a traffic stop.

In August 2022, 17-year-old Nasanto Crenshaw of Fayetteville was shot and killed by a Greensboro officer after the teen was stopped for driving what police believed was a stolen car. His death sparked protests in Greensboro , and Crenshaw’s mother, Wakita Doriety, filed an excessive force lawsuit against both the officer and the city .

The lawsuit was dismissed in district court until Monday when the North Carolina Court of Appeals reversed the dismissal and allowed the lawsuit to proceed.

Police alleged that Crenshaw refused to stop and accelerated at a high rate of speed toward the officer, Matthew Sletten, and that the officer fired through the windshield out of a reasonable fear for his safety.

However, Crenshaw’s mother argued that there were three additional shots fired through the right side of the car, all of which hit Crenshaw, who died at the scene, and that the car was moving at a low rate of speed and turning away from Sletten when he fired.

The courts sided with the defendants initially , dismissing the case against the city and Sletten in July 2023.

The appeals court ruled to “affirm” the dismissal of claims against the City of Greensboro, albeit under a different subparagraph of the same rule and subsection.

The court wrote, “Initially, we agree with the City that the district court properly granted the City’s motion to dismiss on the ground of governmental immunity. However, the district court should have granted the motion under Rule 12(b)(1), not Rule 12(b)(2).”

However, the court of appeals has overturned the dismissal of the excessive force claim against Sletten.

Doriety’s team said that Crenshaw was not accelerating directly towards Sletten, nor was he moving at a high rate of speed. Sletten’s team argued that the body-worn camera video recording “blatantly” contradicted those claims, but the appeals court disagreed.

The video also does not contradict the claim that the shots that killed Crenshaw came from the right side of the car. If the shots came from the right, that would mean that the car was no longer driving toward the officer and, therefore, no longer a threat.

“We have explained that ‘an officer may reasonably apply deadly force to a fleeing suspect—even someone suspected of committing a serious felony—only if the officer has ‘probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant [and immediate] threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others,'” Doriety’s said in court documents.

The documents, which can be viewed below, elaborate on other cases of police force involving a suspect in a vehicle that the court considered.

“We concluded that the officers initially had not used excessive force, because these facts and circumstances caused the officers reasonably to conclude that the car was going to hit them in about ‘one second,'” they wrote, citing Waterman v. Batton . “We also concluded that the same officers did use excessive force by continuing to fire their weapons after the car had passed and it was no longer reasonable to think that the car could hit them.”

The appeals court ultimately found that, because the video evidence at the crux of this claim does not directly and completely contradict Doriety’s version of events, the district court should not have dismissed the lawsuit.

“According to the plaintiff, the district court improperly rejected her plausible allegation that the officer was not in the ‘path’ of the stolen car when the officer first fired his weapon. Relying also on her allegations that the additional shots entered the car through its right passenger window, the plaintiff contends that she adequately alleged that Officer Sletten was standing to the side of the moving car and was not in danger at the time he fired those additional shots,” the documents said.

However, Sletten argued “that Crenshaw drove his car ‘directly’ at the officer, after earlier ‘spe[eding] away’ from the officer and ‘swiping the front end’ of the patrol vehicle. Officer Sletten argues that, based on these ‘facts,’ a reasonable officer could think that he faced an immediate threat of serious physical harm.”

The appeals court said that, when using video as evidence in the summary judgment stage, “a court must credit the plaintiff’s version of the facts to the extent they are not ‘blatantly contradicted’ by the recording.”

“It is difficult to discern many critical details from the video,” the document states. “In addition, the video does not clearly depict at the time the officer fired the additional shots into the passenger window the location of the officer, the path of the stolen car, or the distance between the officer and the stolen car.

“The district court should have construed the facts regarding these additional shots in accord with the plaintiff’s plausible allegations and the reasonable inferences that could be drawn from those allegations. Had the district court done so, it would have considered at this stage of the proceedings that the stolen car was moving past the officer when he fired the additional shots, and that the officer fired multiple times into the side of the stolen car hitting Crenshaw on the right side of his body,” the court said.

Ultimately, the appeals court found that the video did not rise to the high bar of “blatantly contradicting” Doriety’s claims about the events of that night, and therefore the case against the officer should not have been dismissed.

“Based on the plaintiff’s allegations, a reasonable officer in Officer Sletten’s position would not think that the stolen car, which was moving away from the officer, posed a significant and immediate threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer that would justify his conduct of firing one shot through the car’s windshield and additional shots through the car’s passenger window,” the court said. “We therefore reverse the district court’s ruling on the excessive force claim.”

The appeals court concluded the document by acknowledging “that law enforcement officers regularly are placed in threatening situations and are not as a matter of course required to ‘ponder the[] many conflicting factors’ or ‘risk[] losing their last chance to defend themselves’ by ‘paus[ing] for even for an instant,'” but added that the courts must not “short-circuit” a “plaintiff’s plausible claim of excessive force based on a video that does not blatantly contradict those allegations.”

The case will now go back to the lower courts.

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