A judge has tossed a $2 million wrongful death lawsuit that claimed Portland police conducted a shoddy investigation into a dangerous man — allowing him to be freed from jail and then murder a homeless stranger the next day.
In a ruling issued last week, Multnomah County Circuit Judge Eric Dahlin sided with the city, which argued police didn’t make the decision to release 20-year-old Kalil Ford, a judge did. What’s more, the city contended, police couldn’t have foreseen that Ford would go on to murder 53-year-old Mark Anthony Davis within a day of being allowed to walk the streets again.
The facts of the case are as follows:
Police received a report Sept. 28, 2022, that Ford had attacked a 68-year-old disabled Pearl District resident, whom he knew because he periodically walked her dog. Officer Todd Trapp responded to find the woman bleeding from her head and face. The woman told Trapp that Ford had punched her in the face, struck her multiple times with a plastic broom, breaking it, and tried to drag her into her building.
Ford was arrested. The Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office charged him with misdemeanor assault, but Judicial Officer Rebecca Lease ordered his release the next day.
The following day, Sept. 30, 2022, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, Ford began to argue with Davis near a tent in downtown Portland. Witnesses saw Ford stab Davis, who was pronounced dead at the scene.
Ford, who struggled with mental illness, was found guilty except for insanity of assault and murder and ultimately was sentenced to the state psychiatric hospital for life.
The lawsuit, filed by Davis’ adult daughter, alleged that Trapp, the responding officer, didn’t collect video evidence of the original attack on the 68-year-old woman. The suit also contended that the officer didn’t fully document in his police report the truly “vicious” and “brutal” nature of the attack. That, prosecutors would later say, included stomping on the woman’s head.
The lawsuit claimed that a full and accurate picture would have resulted in prosecutors filing felony charges that would have prevented Ford from returning to the streets to kill.
But Senior Deputy City Attorney Elizabeth Woodard argued that Trapp, the responding officer, did his job by responding to the call that Ford had punched the 68-year-old woman and documenting the seriousness of the crime. Then, instead of continuing to gather evidence, Woodard wrote in a memorandum to the judge that the officer left the woman “in the care of fire and medical to pursue Ford,” finding and arresting him a few blocks away.
The lawsuit had been scheduled to go to trial as early as this month before the judge threw it out.
Attorney Alex Cambier, whose firm, Kafoury & McDougal, filed the lawsuit on behalf of the dead man’s daughter, noted that Oregon law makes it exceptionally difficult to successfully sue police for inaction.
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