SANTA CLARA — The city of Santa Clara quietly paid $5.3 million last month to settle an excessive-force lawsuit from the family of Jesus Geney Montes, who was shot and killed by police while he was experiencing a psychiatric breakdown more than four years ago.
The settlement is one of the largest stemming from a police shooting in the region’s history and is the second largest in recent memory for Santa Clara: In 2017, the city paid a $6.7 million settlement to a woman whose leg was broken when police forced entry into her home without a warrant while looking to arrest her teenage daughter.
The city did not announce the settlement until it was required to respond to a public-records request filed by this news organization. The federal civil-rights lawsuit, filed on behalf of Geney Montes’ parents Richard and Amanda Sommers, was scheduled to go to trial this month before the monetary resolution was reached.
“Nothing is going to bring Jesus back. The money will never make Amanda whole again,” said family attorney Fulvio Cajina. “But $5.3 million does send the message that the city did something wrong. To that extent, we’re very content with the settlement because we think we did get justice for the family.”
In a statement, the city said the settlement “was a mutual agreement to support the family dealing with a loss of a family member and is not an admission of wrongdoing on the part of the city’s police department or any of its personnel.”
“It is with the sincere hope that settling this case will help the family begin to deal with the loss of their son,” the statement continues. “The City Council felt it was in the best interest of the Sommers family and Santa Clara Police Department (SCPD) personnel to approve its insurance company’s settlement of this case and not expose the involved parties to a difficult and emotional trial.”
On March 9, 2017, the 24-year-old Geney Montes was in the throes of a mental-health crisis that prompted five police visits to his Deborah Drive apartment the day of the shooting, during which he barricaded himself in his bedroom. At one point he reportedly told officers that “he had a gun and would shoot them if they came in,” according to a November 2017 investigative report by the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office that cleared Officer Colin Stewart of any criminal liability for fatally shooting Geney Montes.
During the first four visits, police decided his behavior did not rise to the level of an arrestable offense, but the fifth police call came with the report that he “had stabbed himself” and fled from his bedroom window. In an encounter captured on body-camera video, officers caught up to Geney Montes as he stood on an embankment along a trail behind the home a short distance from the intersection of Scott Boulevard and Monroe Street.
Geney Montes ran off, and Stewart climbed a wall in pursuit and caught up to him near a fence. Prosecutors said Stewart tried to use his Taser, and soon after he fired his weapon because Geney Montes “continued to charge toward him.” Afterward they discovered Geney Montes was unarmed, and they later found a small bloody kitchen knife he presumably used to injure himself.
In the video, Geney Montes is shown several yards away from officers and separated from them by the fence when Stewart shot him.
In the wake of the death, Richard and Amanda Sommers were joined by local civil-rights groups in protesting his killing and questioning why police resorted to using deadly force on their son, and Cajina reiterated that Geney Montes “was only a danger to himself.”
“Once we uncovered all the evidence, it was clear there were many mistakes that happened on the day Jesus died,” Cajina said. “For me the biggest mistake that caused all this is the fact that Amanda Sommers called repeatedly for help, she called five times that day. SCPD had from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. to reach a solution for this problem.”
Geney Montes’ death pulled into focus the dilemma of police officers being first responders for mental-health emergencies, and since then the police department and other law-enforcement agencies in the region have bolstered their crisis-intervention training. But even today, there is a consensus that such training falls well short of what a clinician can do in these situations, and cities across the country are exploring how to carve out mental-health and non-criminal matters out of police’s purview.
“We need more resources such as being able to contact health-care professionals, and if they can’t come they at least advise (officers) on what to do,” Cajina said. “Sadly officers are the tip of the spear with the mental-health crisis in the U.S. It puts the public and officers’ lives at risk. It’s needless.”
