A civil rights lawsuit filed Tuesday alleges civilian volunteers with the Lane County Sheriff’s Mounted Posse and private security guards racially profiled a 20-year-old Black man from Portland when they tried to question and detain him in 2023 at the county fair in connection with a shooting the night before.
Keviante “Kev” Hill, 20, looked nothing like the suspect – a white man wearing a red hat, according to the suit, county dispatch records and police reports. The only possible connection was that the shooting suspect also was associated with a car seen carrying two other white men and a Black man, according to the suit.
Hill ran from the fair when a sheriff’s posse member approached him and reached for his arm without explanation and without identifying himself, according to the suit.
Hill jumped over a fence to leave the fairgrounds with posse members and at least one private security officer following on foot and in a golf cart through neighboring streets before tackling him in a church parking lot.
The posse members were dressed in cowboy hats with pistols on their waists, according to the suit.
The July 22, 2023, chase prompted complaints to the Oregon Department of Justice, spurred an FBI investigation and drew outrage from the local NAACP blasting what it called a “lack of accountability” for the posse.
“This case is about a violent, racially motivated assault on a young Black man by armed civilians in cowboy costumes operating under the authority of law enforcement during the Lane County Fair,” attorneys Alicia LeDuc Montgomery and Jesse Merrithew wrote in the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Eugene.
The suit alleges unlawful seizure, excessive force, racial discrimination and violations of the state’s bias crime law. It names Lane County, the sheriff’s posse, private security contractor Iron Shield and the Lane County Fair Board as defendants.
Sgt. Jesse Olsen, a sheriff’s spokesperson, declined comment on the suit Tuesday. He said the mounted posse will be at this year’s Lane County Fair to provide parking assistance.
The posse is a volunteer service organization supervised by the sheriff’s office, according to Sgt. Levi McKenny, who serves as the office liaison to the posse and was at the fair that night.
During the fair, the posse oversees traffic flow and helps with parking while on horseback or riding in golf carts, he wrote in a police report.
Members are sworn in as special deputies without arrest or enforcement authority, McKenny wrote. Posse members can carry guns as long as they have concealed handgun licenses or are retired police officers, according to the sheriff’s office. At special events, the members are to only work “within their scope of training,” the sheriff’s policy states.
At 9:56 p.m. on July 22, 2023, a Lane County dispatcher relayed that Eugene police had phoned either private security or someone at the fair to let them know that the person identified on the fairgrounds “does not match the shooter they are looking for,” according to written dispatch records.
Seconds later, the computer dispatch noted the man was possibly the victim from the previous night’s shooting.
At 10:06 p.m., a private security guard and a posse member tackled Hill in the church parking lot about five blocks from the fair near 18th Street as he was suffering an asthma attack, the suit says.
Five minutes later, county dispatch relayed that Eugene had “no police interest in the subject.”
Even after Eugene police confirmed Hill wasn’t a suspect in the non-fatal shooting, posse member Steve Egeter and a private security guard continued to detain Hill and photograph him and told Hill he was trespassed from the fair, the suit says.
A video taken by a witness and released by Hill’s lawyers captures a security guard telling Hill that he saw Hill run from the fair, saying “so I have to chase” but then explained that Eugene police were “not interested” in him.
The guard then said he had to take Hill’s photo though he said when asked by bystanders that he had no idea why he needed to do so, according to the video.
McKenny, the sheriff’s liaison to the posse, said he was near a command trailer when he learned from posse members that security guards were reporting that people involved in the shooting the night before were at the fair.
McKenny said Hill “immediately caught my attention,” noting Hill was dressed in sweat pants and “what looked like a hooded sweatshirt” with the hood pulled up.
McKenny, who was wearing a badge but not in uniform, said after posse member Byron Trapp tried to stop Hill that he identified himself as a police officer and told Hill he needed to cooperate, according to his report. He said he was wearing a tan shirt, blue jeans and cowboy boots with spurs, his report said.
One of the posse members told McKenny he suspected Hill had a gun based on how he “appeared to be walking differently,” as if he “had potentially something in his waist band,” McKenny’s report said.
Trapp wrote a statement attached to McKenny’s report that said when he had touched Hill’s hand or arm in an attempt to talk to him on the fairgrounds that Hill “pulled away,” and asked something like, “What did I do?” Trapp wrote that he had seen Hill walking “with a non-normal gait,” as if there was something heavy in his pants. Though Trapp said both he and McKenny both said they wanted to talk to Hill, Trapp wrote that Hill ran off at a full sprint.
Trapp retired from the Lane County Sheriff’s Office in 2019 after a 31-year career with the agency.
Hill had no weapons on him when stopped, according to the police report filed three days after the encounter.
Less than a month after the posse chase, Eugene’s human rights and equity analyst and the Eugene-Springfield NAACP president alerted the Oregon Department of Justice’s bias response coordinator.
On Tuesday, the NACCP chapter released a statement saying the allegations in the suit raise “urgent questions about how Lane County empowers, trains, and supervises individuals tasked with public safety, particularly when those individuals are volunteer auxiliaries carrying firearms.”
The Oregon Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division documented that a “racially motivated bias crime” occurred but did no further investigation, according to Hill’s lawyers.
Jenny Hansson, state Justice Department spokesperson, said she could not comment on the matter.
The FBI confirmed that it initiated an investigation but declined to say whether it was ongoing or had been completed.
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