A Black man in Eugene, Oregon, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit on Tuesday alleging he was racially profiled, assaulted and detained at a county fair by vigilante volunteers with the local sheriff’s civilian “posse” who were armed and dressed like cowboys and suspected he was involved in a shooting the night before.
Keviantae “Kev” Hill, then 20, lived in Portland and was in Eugene visiting two friends on July 22, 2023, when they decided to go to the Lane County Fair. After checking out the horses and large animals, riding the ferris wheel and noshing on fair food, the lawsuit (obtained by Atlanta Black Star) says, the three took a break at his friend’s house nearby for a few hours.
Soon after they reentered the fair, around 9:30 p.m., two men began following Hill in a golf cart, pointing flashlights at him and trying to get his attention by calling out, “hey” and “excuse me,” and saying they needed to talk to him, the complaint says, but not identifying or explaining themselves.
One grabbed his arm, and another placed his hand on a visible gun, prompting Hill to fear for his safety and to run back towards the fair’s main entrance and through the parking lot, jump over a fence and continue fleeing on public streets.
What Hill didn’t know was that a shooting had occurred at the fair the night before, and both the suspect and victim were still at large.
Private security guards at the fair had relayed to members of the Lane County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse, civilian volunteers whose primary role that day was to help with parking cars, that Hill might be their suspect.
The Mounted Posse members, who are deputized and supervised by the county sheriff’s office, wear uniforms reminiscent of cowboy attire, including blue jeans, cowboy hats and boots with spurs, and some carry firearms if they are licensed to do so, the complaint says. Sometimes they ride horses and at other times they drive golf carts. They are not authorized to detain people or to make arrests.
Two Mounted Posse members chased Hill, who has asthma, for several blocks, using a golf cart to try to ram him in a church parking lot, the lawsuit says. As Hill began to have an asthma attack, they tackled him, forced him face-down to the ground, knelt on his back and refused to let him sit up or change his position to breathe better for several minutes, despite the fact that he was gasping for air and saying he could not breathe.
Hill vomited red fluid and begged the men to let him call someone, but they refused, the lawsuit says, and did not call 911, call for backup, or seek medical assistance. One of the men, defendant Steve Egeret, finally took his knee off Hill’s back when witnesses including the mother of Hill’s friend arrived and “demanded they stop the assault” while another began to video the incident with a phone.
The lawsuit says the posse members contacted the Eugene Police Department during the incident and were told that Hill was not a suspect in the fair-related shooting and that police had no interest in detaining him. But the men persisted in restraining him, and photographed Hill without his consent and without providing any explanation for doing so.
Then they let him get up, and on the advice of defendant Levi McKenney, a sergeant with the Lane County Sheriff’s Office who supervised the posse (and had set off the pursuit of Hill that night), informed Hill that he was trespassed from the fairgrounds.
Hill, who was “visibly shaking” at that point, lost consciousness shortly after being released, the complaint says, and continued to vomit and spit up blood two hours after the incident.
Later McKenny said that Hill had caught his attention because he was wearing “sweat style pants” and a “hooded sweatshirt,” the complaint says. Another defendant and posse member, Byron Trapp, a former Lane County sheriff, said he became suspicious of Hill because of the unusual way he walked, which seemed to indicate he had a gun in his waist band.
Hill did not have any weapons and had no criminal history, the lawsuit says. A police report filed three days after the incident said Hill had no weapons when stopped, reported Oregonlive.com.
Trapp also reported that the prior day’s shooting involved “several late teen/young adults of Black and white races,” which the complaint notes was “a vague description that could have applied to the many thousands of other fair goers that day.”
County dispatch records and police reports identified the suspect as a white man wearing a red hat, Oregonlive reported, noting that “the only possible connection was that the shooting suspect was associated with a car seen carrying two other white men and a Black man.”
The lawsuit accuses the Lane County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse, the Lane County Fair Board, the county, the private security firm Iron Shield, and four individual members of the posse of false arrest, excessive use of force, assault and battery, negligence, and violations of the state’s bias crime law by subjecting Hill to unlawful treatment because he was a Black man.
It says that the defendants collectively committed “a violent, racially motivated assault on a young Black man by armed civilians in cowboy costumes” who were “carrying pistols, and acting with police-like power but without police training, accountability or oversight.”
Noting that Hill was unarmed, posed no threat, was not resisting, and was not suspected of any crime, the lawsuit says the tackling, pinning and detention of Hill while he was in medical distress constituted excessive force in violation of the Fourth and 14th Amendments and caused him physical injury, fear and trauma, emotional distress and psychological harm.
The civilian posse members were not authorized to pursue Hill outside of the fairgrounds or to detain him, the complaint contends, and their racial profiling and physical abuse of him, and failure to deescalate their use of force, especially after learning he was not a valid suspect, was the inevitable outcome of county and state fair officials’ poor decision to put “untrained, unqualified, armed volunteers in charge of public security.”
The Lane County District Attorney declined to pursue any charges in the case, but the FBI opened an investigation into potential criminal civil rights violations, the lawsuit says. The FBI declined to say whether its investigation is ongoing or has been completed, reported Oregonlive.
The city of Eugene conducted a review of the incident and issued a memorandum documenting its concerns, including: the failure of sworn officers on scene to activate or wear body cameras; the fact that Hill did not match the description of the shooting suspect; that fairground staff continued their pursuit and detention of him despite being told he was not the right person; and that the Mounted Posse members, while civilian volunteers, were armed and acting in a law enforcement capacity without appropriate oversight.
The lawsuit includes exposition on the history of the posse comitatus legal doctrine and movement in Oregon, dating back to 1887, which empowers sheriffs to summon citizens to enforce the law. It argues that law enforcement-affiliated groups have been tied to the Ku Klux Klan, racist militia movements and “broader vigilantism” in the region, and cautions that “the legacy and structure of the Lane County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse … reflect the dangers of arming and deputizing civilians to operate in public-facing, quasi-policing roles without clear limitations.”
In a statement issued after the lawsuit was filed, the Eugene-Springfield Branch of the NAACP said the unjustified targeting and treatment of Hill “not only suggest a dangerous disregard for public safety and civil rights but also conjure the painful imagery of this country’s racial past — armed posses on horseback pursuing Black bodies, invoking echoes of slave patrols and racial terror.”
“This incident is not just about one individual,” Drae Charles, the NAACP branch executive director, posted on Facebook. “It’s about the systems that allow this kind of racial profiling and abuse to happen in our own backyard — and the collective responsibility we share to confront them.”
Hill seeks a jury trial to determine general and compensatory damages for his physical injuries, pain and suffering, trauma and humiliation; special damages for lost wages and out-of-pocket expenses; economic damages for past and future medical care and mental health treatment; and punitive damages against each individual defendant.
Officials with Lane County and the Lane County Sheriff’s Office told reporters they could not comment on pending litigation.
All of the defendants have 21 days from the date they were served with the complaint to file a response in the U.S. District Court of Oregon in Eugene.
Great Job Jill Jordan Sieder & the Team @ Atlanta Black Star Source link for sharing this story.
