Wrongful death suit could slam city

By Dave Lieber
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

Attention, 60,000 residents of North Richland Hills!

The Sept. 11 election on whether to enact a residential tax freeze for seniors and disabled persons is distracting you from the real money issue facing your city: the legal disaster that awaits the North Richland Hills police in a pending wrongful death federal lawsuit.

If voters approve the tax freeze, the city estimates the lost revenue for the next five years at $895,000. For the next 10 years, the loss will be about $4.5 million, City Manager Larry Cunningham told me.

That's peanuts compared with what you stand to lose because of the 1999 shooting death of Troy Davis.

Records released recently to lawyers who filed an open records request show that North Richland Hills taxpayers have already paid about $800,000 in legal fees for that case and fees and settlements from other police-related lawsuits since 2000.

Your city is self-insured, which means that if you fall victim to a multimillion-dollar jury verdict, no insurance company stands ready to bail you out. The money will come from your tax dollars.

Mayor Oscar Trevino calls my repeated warnings "garbage." Reader Gene Barnett, in a letter to the editor published in the Star-Telegram last week, calls the warnings unfounded tirades.

The only reason I write this is that I want to save you money. You do not need to pay all that you will pay in the coming years if you settle the lawsuit now.

The lawsuit is absolutely not winnable.

How do I know?

A three-judge Texas Court of Appeals ruling last month provides the clearest proof yet that your city is heading toward financial disaster.

That ruling should hit your city leaders like a baseball bat in the forehead, but instead it's business as usual in North Richland Hills.

"I'm confident of the outcome once we get to court," City Attorney George Staples said last month.

His confidence is misplaced. The three judges ruled that the police raid on Barbara Davis' home that led to the killing of her son, Troy, was illegal.

Illegal.

And this raid is the foundation of your city's defense.

Sgt. Andy Wallace, then leader of the SWAT team, "made several statements in his affidavit with reckless disregard for their truth," the ruling states.

The judges wrote that when these false statements that led to the raid are removed, "there remains no probable cause to support the arrest of the two individuals" -- Troy and Barbara Davis.

And, the ruling continues, "there remains no probable cause to support the issuance of a search warrant at the target residence. Therefore, we conclude the warrants must be voided and any evidence obtained from the search must be excluded."

How stunning that these judges issued this ruling.

What does it take to see that the basis for the city's defense has evaporated? As the case proceeds, legal fees will jump another half-million dollars or more. A jury verdict in federal court, not restricted by state limitations enacted on jury verdicts this year, could easily total many millions of dollars.

Do you want to go before a jury and defend the actions of Sgt. Wallace, who the judges ruled had not verified important information that he swore he had verified?

Do you want your city to present its case knowing that the judges declared that Wallace undertook no independent investigation "regarding the identity, credibility, or reliability of the confidential informant" whose tip led to the raid? A tip with information that later proved false and led to Davis' death?

And what of those who will say that Barbara Davis was convicted of drug possession? Yes, that was true, initially. But this ruling throws out the basis of that conviction because of police error.

Because prosecutors have not announced any appeal, Barbara Davis' conviction will be reversed.

Yet the city stubbornly refuses to settle. City Manager Cunningham, Mayor Trevino and a majority of council members have dug in on the advice of City Attorney Staples, whose law firm, not so coincidentally, is receiving the bulk of these legal fees.

Residents of North Richland Hills, you are being duped.

Police Chief Thomas Shockley, who's responsible for the errors caused by his officers, is still in place. What does it take for new leadership to come to a town where the fundamental basis of this police raid, the reason and the motives, are now declared by three top judges to be illegal?

It's your money, and it's going down a rat hole.

This future loss of millions of dollars in legal fees and a jury verdict makes all talk of a senior tax freeze pale in comparison.

Dave Lieber's column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.

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