CNN:
A West Virginia city has agreed to pay a former police officer $175,000 to settle a wrongful-termination lawsuit after he was fired following his decision not to shoot a distraught suspect who was holding a gun.
The lawsuit accused the Weirton Police Department of wrongfully terminating officer Stephen Mader after he chose not to shoot a 23-year-old man while responding to a domestic disturbance in 2016.
“At the end of the day, I’m happy to put this chapter of my life to bed,” Mader said in a news release by the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia.
“The events leading to my termination were unjustified and I’m pleased a joint resolution has been met. My hope is that no other person on either end of a police call has to go through this again.”
The incident occurred May 6, 2016, when Mader responded to a domestic-disturbance call and found Ronald “R.J.” Williams Jr. with an unloaded handgun.
Mader told CNN last year that Williams was “visibly choked up” and told Mader to shoot him. As a Marine veteran who served in Afghanistan, Mader told CNN that he concluded Williams wasn’t a threat and so he tried to de-escalate the situation.
As Mader was trying to get Williams to drop his gun, two other Weirton police officers arrived. Mader told CNN that Williams raised his gun and was immediately shot and killed by one of the other officers. A state investigation found the officer’s actions were justified.
On June 7, 2016, the Weirton Police Department fired Mader. The lawsuit, filed in May 2017, claims the department fired him because of “failure to meet probationary standards of an officer” and “apparent difficulties in critical incident reasoning.”
“Failure to meet probationary standards.” Or in other words, he wasn’t pathological enough for law enforcement work in America. You see, Marine, there is nothing more important than the costumed clowns going home safely at the end of their shift. The ability to discern your surroundings and circumstances and make wise judgments isn’t valued in American LEO work.
Unfortunately, the citizens will pay for this settlement. He should never have been fired. Instead, the police officer who fired him should have been stripped naked, marched out the public square and publicly flogged. Then the young Marine should have been put in charge of the department.
But that’s not the America we live in today, now is it?
