DENVER – A Hells Angels member received $25,000 and an apology after he filed a lawsuit claiming that police “terrorized” him in a 2018 police stop.
Anthony Mills filed a lawsuit in April after an incident two years earlier in which a LaSalle, Colorado police officer pulled him over for speeding. After he was stopped, the officer, David Miller, can be heard on the body cam video that he was pulled over for “going way too fast,” according to KMGH-TV.
The lawsuit alleges that more than half a dozen law enforcement officials from various jurisdictions were called in.
“All the patrol cars activated their spotlights, headlights and overhead lights to completely blind the plaintiff, Mills, and his friend,” according to the lawsuit obtained by KMGH-TV.
Mills’ attorney, Sarah Schielke, said in a statement that the officer later asked the other officers to turn their body cameras off before they shared stories about the violent acts they have committed against members of the Hells Angels.
Miller then announced to the group that if Mills behaved in a manner he didn’t like, the officer would shoot him, according to footage from Miller’s body camera, which he left on.
“’I’m shooting him! I need some paid vacation!” Miller said on the body camera footage.
Both Mills and his friend, Theodore Simpson who was also stopped, did not have a criminal history or outstanding warrants.
Miller filed his suit against the city of Greeley, the town of LaSalle, the Weld County Sheriff’s Office and individual officers from those jurisdictions and the Kersey and Garden City police departments, the Denver Post reported Friday.
“When police officers openly discuss with one another their disdain for one group of citizens that they are sworn to serve and protect, and make jokes about killing those citizens for ‘paid vacation leave,’ they normalize police misconduct and murder. Cop jokes about some lives not mattering inevitably fosters a culture of police officers who are much more willing to pull the trigger on those same lives later,” Schielke said in a statement obtained by the Denver Post.
Miller issued an apology to Mills and has since resigned from the department, Schielke said.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
Five Colorado police agencies paid $25,000 and issued an apology to a member of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang after an officer joked that he’d shoot the man to get paid vacation.
