The City of Fort Worth has approved a settlement with the family of Jerry Waller, who was shot and killed by police officers in May 2013, after a decade-long legal battle. The settlement, amounting to over $800,000 of taxpayer money, is an outcome of a lawsuit that accused the city and police officers of violating Waller's constitutional rights the night of the fatal shooting mishap, in which officers Richard Hoeppner and Benjamin Hanlon accidentally went to the wrong address while responding to a burglary call, according to The Dallas Express.
Originally, rookie officers Hoeppner and Hanlon had been dispatched to check on a neighbor whose burglar alarm had accidentally been set off, and the GPS guided them to Waller's street, but they failed to verify the proper address, leading them to Waller's home where he was fatally shot in his garage.
During the incident, Waller, a 72-year-old man, had armed himself to investigate suspicious noises thinking a burglar might be outside his house, and it was here that the lives of Jerry Waller and the Fort Worth police officers tangled fatally. The officers claimed Waller had a gun and did not obey commands to drop it, after which they shot him seven times, although Waller's wife contested that account, as stated by the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, insisting her husband would never have threatened police.
Kathy Waller recounted the night as a nightmare where her husband did not deserve the fate he met with neither did she deserve being held inside a police cruiser and denied the chance to communicate or check on her husband, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Art Brender, the family's attorney, emphasized the apparent discrepancies and contradictions in the officers' accounts of the event, accusing them of fabricating their stories to justify the shooting, also suggesting crime scene evidence was tampered with which is supported, he said, by a forensic reenactment of the shooting.
