An Arvada police officer shot and killed a pregnant woman after mistaking her for a shoplifting suspect two years ago in an altercation the woman’s family now says never should have happened.
Destinee Thompson’s surviving family members filed a wrongful death and excessive force lawsuit against five Arvada police officers on Tuesday, two years after the 27-year-old mother of three was killed as she drove away from officers on Aug. 17, 2021.
On the day of the shooting, Arvada police were called to the Target store on Kipling Street, where an employee told officers that he’d recognized a known shoplifter in the store and confronted the woman, but that she’d threatened him with a knife and left with a cartful of unpaid merchandise. The employee told officers the woman was white or Hispanic, was wearing a black tank top and had a large tattoo on her chest.
“This woman had done nothing wrong, and you have every right to tell the police, ‘I don’t want to speak to you,'” said attorney Siddhartha Rathod, whose firm Rathod Mohamedbhai is representing Destinee Thompson’s family in the lawsuit. Five officers surrounded Thompson’s van and shouted at her to get out of the van. One officer used a baton to smash the passenger side window. Thompson backed up the van — grazing the bumper of the truck officers had parked behind her — then pulled forward away from the officers, over the curb and into the street.
“Officer Benallo’s singular focus on the threat posed by the minivan resulted in his failure to perceive the plain clothed officer, alive and well, until the minivan was eastbound on the frontage road,” King wrote in the letter. She found that Benallo misperceived the space between Thompson’s van and another vehicle, and that mistake led him to reasonably believe a fellow officer had been struck and that his or others lives were in danger.
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