Court Ruling Shows How Scott Shellenberger Looks The Other Way When Police Kill The Most Vulnerable
“They shot and killed a man who needed [their] help,” a judge wrote in a case against police officers who killed a man in distress.
On the morning of December 14, 2015, a woman in Middle River, Maryland called 911 to save her boyfriend’s life. Jeffrey Gene Evans, 52, was suicidal and had swallowed lethal amounts of prescription painkillers. When Baltimore County police arrived, Evans refused to leave with them and go to the hospital. But instead of seeking trained experts to defuse an obvious mental health crisis, police officers tased Evans and then shot him six times, killing him.
Police said that Evans had moved toward them with kitchen knives, but their own video showed otherwise. In fact, a kitchen island separated Evans and the officers, and one expert later testified that in more than 100 video viewings he never saw Evans advance towards an officer.
Last year, a federal judge allowed a lawsuit against the officers to move forward, ruling that they were not entitled to “qualified immunity” — a doctrine that shields all but the most egregious police violence from civil liability. “None of the evidence indicates that Evans walked around the kitchen island to get to the side where the Officers were located,” the judge wrote, adding that “there is no indication . . . that the Officers exhausted, or even attempted, alternatives to physical force, such as a request for the intervention of the mobile crisis team.”
Instead, the judge wrote, the officers “shot and killed a man who needed [their] help.”
While a federal judge recognized that Evans’s killing was both needless and unlawful, Baltimore County State’s Attorney Scott Shellenberger, who failed to file criminal charges against the officers, apparently did not.
The absence of police accountability is a growing trend in Baltimore County, where top prosecutor Shellenberger allows officers to kill with near impunity. Since 2013, county police officers have killed 28 people, including eight people in 2019 — the most that year in any Maryland county. Shellenberger cleared the officers in every single case, even when, as with Evans’s killing, their accounts are contradicted by video footage or the witness accounts of other officers.
Perhaps Shellenberger’s reluctance to charge killer cops should be unsurprising, just one more way to curry favor with the police unions who generously support his campaigns. While Shellenberger’s primary challenger, attorney Robbie Leonard, pledged to “not take one dollar from the Fraternal Order of Police,” Shellenberger accepted thousands in FOP donations just last year.
Shellenberger has also opposed popular police reforms. In 2020, for example, Shellenberger opposed a county reform measure to ban the use of chokeholds and to prohibit the county from hiring officers who were fired from other departments for excessive force, among other reforms. Shellenberger called the bill “unworkable” and “truly unfair” to police officers. (Shellenberger later supported an amended version of the measure, but only after the police union was also on board.) At the state level, Shellenberger opposed legislation that would protect children from coercive police interrogations, protecting police power to bully kids into false confessions.
But a closer look at the county’s police shootings reveals a disturbing pattern: Not only do these cases not involve violent or dangerous crimes, they often do not involve crime at all. Instead, the typical victim is someone in acute distress — people battling depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder who may be suicidal in the moment and desperately need help. Yet when police respond with brutal violence—and judges and juries condemn the killings, with millions in civil verdicts against the county piling up—Scott Shellenberger just looks the other way.
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In 2016, Shellenberger cleared the officer who shot and killed a woman while she made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for her five-year-old son. Police had arrived to arrest Korryn Gaines for missing traffic court, but she refused, starting a six-hour standoff. At the scene, Gaines’s fiancé told police that she was mentally ill and had not been taking her medications. But instead of de-escalating, Officer Royce Ruby shot Gaines through drywall, entered the home, and fired three more times. Gaines’s five-year-old boy was also shot twice. Police claimed they feared for their lives, but a neighbor heard Ruby announce that “I’m sick of this shit” shortly before shooting into the home. A civil jury awarded the family $38 million, among the largest verdicts ever awarded against Maryland law enforcement.
This wasn’t the first time that Officer Ruby shot and killed a mentally ill person; in 2007 he killed a 24-year-old suicidal bipolar man who aimed a BB gun at officers. Yet Shellenberger credited Ruby’s account of Gaines’s shooting and cleared him of wrongdoing. Afterward, a lawyer for Gaines’s family said that prosecutors failed to conduct a real investigation into the shooting. “What we’ve learned is that the state's attorney’s office really was just fed information by the Baltimore County Police Department,” he said.
In 2015, police forced their way into the home of 41-year-old Spencer Lee McCain while responding to a “domestic disturbance.” McCain was unarmed, and according to a lawsuit later filed against police, officers knew that McCain was diagnosed with schizophrenia based on more than a dozen previous 911 calls from the home. This time, officers said that upon entering they found McCain in a “defensive position,” and immediately fired 18 shots. One officer then shot McCain once more in the chest as he lay on the floor, trying to comply with officer demands that he move his arms to be handcuffed, according to the lawsuit. No charges against the officers were filed.
In 2013, Baltimore County agreed to a $1 million settlement for the 2009 non-fatal shooting of 27-year-old Odatei Mills. Mills, who was bipolar, had called police himself but acted erratically when they arrived. Police said they shot him when he threatened them with a dining room chair. According to a lawsuit, officers then shot him several more times in the back while he was lying on the floor, with one officer pausing to reload his weapon. Mills was hospitalized for more than a year and had his left leg amputated above the knee. Shellenberger did not prosecute the officers but did try Mills on four counts of second-degree assault.
Finally, in May 2020 police shot and killed Robert Johnson Jr., 29, after responding to an argument over a fender bender. A gun fell to the ground as Johnson got out of his car. Witnesses at the scene said that Johnson picked up the gun and was running away and towards his home when the police officer opened fire. The bodycam footage also showed that Johnson’s back was facing the officer when the officer pulled the trigger eight times, striking Johnson three times in his back and butt. One of the officer’s bullets missed Johnson, pierced the door of Johnson’s home, and struck his younger brother while the brother was trying to guide young children up the stairs and away from the police. Shellenberger declined to prosecute the officer.
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While police violence has been the focus of national attention in neighboring Baltimore City, the issue is now front and center in this year’s state’s attorney race in Baltimore County. Shellenberger faces a primary opponent for the first time since he took office 15 years ago, and challenger Robbie Leonard has labeled Shellenberger an “anti-police reform prosecutor.”
Last year, when testifying against state legislation that would empower the state attorney general to investigate police killings, Shellenberger pointed to elections as the only oversight he needs. “If bad decisions concerning police actions are made by local prosecutors they will be voted out of office,” he said. This year we’ll see.