The family of a 28-year-old rideshare driver killed when a woman fleeing Milwaukee police slammed into his car has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city and the officers involved in the chase. Al-Mukhtar Abdullah Muhammad Sidiya died on July 29, 2025, after then-22-year-old Cera Wilkerson sped through the intersection of East Brady Street and North Humboldt Avenue and struck the driver's side of his vehicle.
The civil case, filed Sept. 16, alleges wrongful death and claims officers negligently continued a high-speed chase through busy city streets, according to jsonline.com. Another passenger riding with Sidiya sustained non-life-threatening injuries and was taken to the hospital, the same report notes. The Milwaukee Police Department and city officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the lawsuit, per that account.
Police said Wilkerson was traveling 88 mph in a 25-mph zone while fleeing officers just before the crash, according to WISN. The Milwaukee County District Attorney's Office is pursuing criminal charges against Wilkerson for second-degree reckless homicide and second-degree reckless injury, among other public-safety charges, the report states.
A Nephew Who Had Just Started Building a Life Here
Sidiya had come to the United States from Mauritania in 2023, and only one of his family members lived in the country at the time of his death, according to the same source. His uncle, Ibrahim Minih, described his nephew as hardworking, humble and helpful, and said the tragedy should signal necessary changes to police chase policies.
The Wisconsin Law Journal notes that the lawsuit points to the high-speed pursuit itself, not just Wilkerson's driving, as the underlying cause of the crash. That framing puts Milwaukee's broader pursuit practices squarely at issue, at a moment when the department's chase policy has already drawn scrutiny from city officials.
A Policy Overhaul That Stalled at City Hall
Nine people died across six Milwaukee police chases in 2025, and a 10th person later died from injuries tied to a 2024 pursuit crash, according to the Journal Sentinel. The station WUWM reported that the city averaged three police pursuits a day in 2025, with six of the nine fatalities involving bystanders rather than the fleeing drivers themselves, per WUWM.
Between 800 and 1,100 police chases have occurred in Milwaukee since 2019, and officers cited reckless driving as the reason for 76% of all pursuits in 2025, the Journal Sentinel reported. Earlier this year, the Milwaukee Fire and Police Commission unanimously passed a proposal that would have curtailed chases for non-violent offenses and brought department policy closer to national standards. But the Milwaukee Public Safety and Health Committee voted 4-1 against the measure on June 11, effectively killing the Common Council effort to change the rules; officials had estimated the proposal would have reduced chases by about 15%.
Costly Precedent in Other Cities
Milwaukee's police department has been revising its pursuit policy following the string of pursuit-related deaths, per a January report from the Journal Sentinel's parent publication. Nationally, governments and insurers paid more than $80 million in pursuit-related settlements and judgments between 2017 and 2022, according to WUWM, which cited a study finding more than 3,300 pursuit fatalities from 2017 through 2020, including 550 bystanders. A separate dataset cited by the Journal Sentinel put the toll at least 3,336 people killed in police vehicle pursuits over a slightly longer 2017-to-2022 span.
Chicago offers a costly example of where such litigation can lead. A Cook County jury was set to decide whether the Chicago Police Department bore liability for the death of Dominga Flores Gomez, a 55-year-old woman struck by a driver being chased by officers, according to WTTW. The Chicago City Council had refused in February to settle that case for $8.25 million; in December 2024, a separate Cook County jury had ordered the city to pay $79.85 million in a similar pursuit case, which was later resolved for $62.5 million, WTTW reported. Chicago changed its own pursuit policy in 2020 and again in 2022 to require officers to weigh immediate apprehension against the danger a chase poses to the public, the outlet noted.
