By Matthew Reisen
Albuquerque Journal, N.M.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The city of Albuquerque has agreed to pay $6.5 million to the family of a man who was killed by officers as he paced back and forth amid a mental health crisis, mumbling and clutching a pair of nail clippers.
The settlement in the 2022 death of Jesus “Jessie” Crosby is the largest paid in an Albuquerque police shooting in recent history. It ended the lawsuit in a case that spawned policy changes within the Albuquerque Police Department and, for a time, hung over the agency’s reform efforts.
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In a statement released through their attorney, Crosby’s family said, “We are relieved to have reached closure with the City… and we are proud to have helped advance accountability for excessive and avoidable police force against people in crisis.”
“We hope that APD’s pattern of using excessive force has ended. But mostly, we just miss Jessie,” according to the statement. “We look forward to putting this case behind us, and we will continue to find inspiration in our best memories of him.”
The City Attorney’s Office released a statement Friday, saying the incident “should have been handled differently.”
“While there are many failures in the criminal justice system, the city continues to improve its response to people who are experiencing a mental health crisis. We want to do everything possible to get people the help they need and prevent the tragic loss of life,” according to the statement.
The lawsuit was filed in 2nd Judicial District Court in 2023 and scheduled for a jury trial in October.
According to APD records and past Journal reporting, the settlement is the largest reached in a police shooting since 2013, when the city agreed to pay $7.95 million to the family of Kenneth Ellis — a man threatening suicide in front of a gas station. In the death of James Boyd, arguably the most high-profile APD shooting in history, the city paid a $5 million settlement.
Attorney Mark Fine, who represented Crosby’s family, said they found relief “but no joy” in the resolution of their case. He said APD’s “long-standing refusal to comply with police reforms was as deadly to Jesus as the bullets.”
On Nov. 10, 2022, five officers approached 41-year-old Crosby, a diagnosed schizophrenic well-known to police, near the Downtown police headquarters parking lot. They were there to arrest him for trespassing, armed with Tasers and firearms.
For several minutes, the officers asked Crosby, who clutched nail clippers, to surrender and threatened to shock him with a Taser. At one point Crosby stepped forward and officers Chance Gore and Alex Couch fired their guns while two other officers fired their Tasers.
They continued firing after Crosby hit the ground, shooting him 11 times.
In a year when APD officers shot a record-high 18 people, killing 10 of them, the Crosby case stood out. It led the department to change use-of-force policies and was repeatedly brought up during hearings in APD’s federally mandated reform effort.
Former APD Chief Harold Medina called Crosby’s death “a tragedy” but blamed it on a “broken criminal justice system” for not giving him psychological treatment after past arrests. The police union president said the shooting was preventable had the officers only used less-lethal munitions. Paul Killebrew, then-deputy chief of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, called it “a very troubling case” even as he applauded APD’s overall progress in its consent decree with the DOJ.
Following an investigation into the shooting, a force investigator, civilian oversight director and one member of the Force Review Board — made up of APD’s top brass —found the shooting out of policy. An Internal Affairs Force Division commander and the rest of the FRB reversed that finding.
The team in charge of monitoring APD in its court-approved settlement agreement (CASA) said the case was mishandled. Ruling the shooting justified was “a grave and substantial malfeasance,” the team said.
“From our perspective, it’s kind of hard to see how the cultural reform and that case can coexist in the same place,” said Phil Coyne of the monitoring team in a 2024 CASA hearing.
Last year, the DOJ filed a motion to dismiss the decadelong reform effort, saying APD had reached full compliance with the CASA and “has become a self-assessing and self-correcting agency.” The department had devoted thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars to the CASA process, creating entire divisions and rewriting policies to meet hundreds of requirements under the consent decree.
Even as overall use-of-force incidents decreased, police shootings spiked and many cases involved those in the grips of a mental health crisis. In some cases, those killed threatened suicide and told police to shoot them, even pointing cellphones and other objects at officers, as if they were guns.
The deadly force used in almost all shootings, including Crosby’s, was found to be in compliance with APD policy.
Peter Cubra, a retired attorney who defended people with disabilities in the reform effort for years, said the settlement — while one of the biggest — was not enough. He said that Crosby’s death was “the most unreasonable” he had seen and yet, from his view, didn’t change APD’s behaviors “in any way.”
But Cubra said Bernalillo County and its Metropolitan Detention Center — where Crosby was jailed repeatedly — were “just as culpable” for not getting him the mental health treatment he needed.
Cubra said something could still be learned from the case, however.
“The police department should not be jailing people who are in psychiatric crisis, because that’s very dangerous for them. And if the police department continues to arrest people for being homeless and disordered and taking them to jail, more deaths will undoubtedly occur,” he said. “People like Mr. Crosby needed and deserved residential mental health treatment, not incarceration and arrest.”
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