A lawsuit filed in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court claims Cincinnati's 911 dispatch system failed 19-year-old Amir Jordan before he was fatally struck by a police cruiser responding to what was believed to be an active shooting. The suit alleges a call taker knew for more than six minutes that no one had actually been shot before Jordan was hit while crossing Este Avenue in Spring Grove Village after stepping off a Metro bus.
According to the lawsuit, as reported by the Cincinnati Enquirer, the 911 call that sent officers racing toward Spring Grove Village on August 29, 2024, involved a gun that had been fired but had not struck anyone — a routine property-damage call involving a firearm discharge, not an active shooter situation. Despite that, the call was coded as a priority 1-red shooting, and the suit claims the call taker had six minutes and seven seconds between learning no one was shot and the moment Jordan was hit to correct the record. Even after learning the person who fired the gun had already left the scene, the suit says, the call taker still had four minutes and 40 seconds to update responding officers before the crash.
Hoodline's original coverage of the crash detailed that Jordan was struck at the corner of Este and Chickering Avenues at approximately 6 p.m. by a 2021 Ford Explorer cruiser running its emergency lights and sirens while responding to the reported shooting. Police traffic investigators reviewed dashcam and transit bus video footage in the aftermath. The lawsuit, filed by attorneys Robb Stokar, Thomas Bruns and Zachary Gottesman on behalf of Jordan's mother, Shenee McClendon, and his estate, seeks damages exceeding $25,000 along with court-supervised reforms to how Cincinnati's Emergency Communications Center prioritizes, classifies, dispatches, reports, trains for, supervises and audits 911 calls.
Claims of a Cover-Up at the Dispatch Center
The lawsuit names the city of Cincinnati, City Manager Sheryl Long, ECC Director William Vedra, two other ECC leaders and two call takers as defendants. It alleges that 911 center leadership knew as early as October 2022 that calls were being misclassified with unwarranted high priorities, and that leadership hid the call-miscoding problems despite multiple internal warnings. The suit further claims ECC personnel were instructed to avoid generating public records that might reflect poorly on the center's performance.
Perhaps the most serious allegation in the filing is that 911 center leadership conspired with Long and others to conceal the true cause of Jordan's death. The suit points to a sworn affidavit signed by Martha Murrell, an administrative assistant to Vedra, describing his actions, and alleges Vedra prohibited electronic recording of ECC meetings. The lawsuit also states that no agency liability report was created specifically for Jordan's death, even though ECC records show one such report was produced for a separate incident between March 1, 2021, and December 31, 2024. The suit says ECC training had ingrained the proposition that any gun discharge justified coding a call as a gun-related emergency, regardless of whether anyone was shot.
A City Already Under Court Oversight
This is not Cincinnati's first brush with allegations of 911 dispatch failure turning deadly. In April 2021, the city agreed to a $6 million wrongful death settlement with the family of 16-year-old Kyle Plush, who suffocated in 2018 after becoming trapped inside a folding seat in his minivan. Plush used voice commands to call 911 twice, but dispatchers failed to relay critical location details to responding officers, according to WVXU. That settlement placed Cincinnati under a court-supervised, five-year reform plan requiring the city to bring in three independent 911 experts and put $250,000 toward initial Emergency Communications Center upgrades.
Between 2022 and 2023, the city spent an additional $450,000 implementing national Police and Fire Priority Dispatch Systems, standardized decision-tree protocols meant to help call takers categorize emergencies and assess scene safety more accurately, per the same outlet's reporting. Jordan's family is now asking a court to layer even more oversight onto a center that has already spent years under outside scrutiny following the Plush case.
The Legal Hurdle: Sovereign Immunity
Any recovery for Jordan's estate will hinge on clearing a high legal bar. Under Ohio Revised Code Chapter 2744, municipalities and their employees are generally shielded from personal injury lawsuits unless a plaintiff can prove reckless, wanton or willful misconduct rather than ordinary negligence, according to the County Commissioners Association of Ohio. Separately, Ohio Revised Code Section 4511.24 exempts emergency vehicles running lights and sirens from standard speed limits, but still requires officers to drive with due regard for the safety of everyone on the road.
Cincinnati has a policy of not commenting on ongoing litigation, but the city will likely respond to the lawsuit in court. Jordan was crossing near a Metro bus stop that lacked a marked crosswalk when he was hit — a detail that ties this case to a broader pattern of pedestrian risk along the city's multi-lane corridors. On August 5, Cincinnati renamed a street after Jordan, a gesture intended to honor him and remind the community about pedestrian safety.
A Broader Pedestrian Safety Push
Jordan's death arrives amid a citywide reckoning over pedestrian safety. Hamilton County recorded 2,099 pedestrian-vehicle crashes between 2020 and 2025, ranking third among Ohio's 88 counties, according to Ohio State Highway Patrol data cited by CET Connect. Cincinnati has invested more than $14 million since 2018 in speed humps, raised crosswalks, traffic-calming installations and longer pedestrian crossing intervals, a build-out chronicled in Hoodline's report on an eight-year fight for safer streets.
Those investments appear to be paying off in the aggregate: citywide pedestrian fatalities fell to five in 2025, down from six in 2024 and ten in 2023, following the city's late-2022 adoption of a Complete Streets policy, per WVXU. Still, Jordan's case underscores that infrastructure fixes alone cannot address failures inside the 911 system itself — the specific breakdown his family's lawsuit says cost him his life.
