FORKS, Wash. — The City of Forks has paid $333,000 to settle a civil-rights lawsuit filed by relatives of a man who was shot and killed by police in 2016 after an officer allegedly escalated a welfare check into a deadly confrontation.
The lawsuit filed by the family of Edward Lowell Hills was unusual in that it didn’t name the officer who filed the fatal shot as a defendant, but blamed the shooting on the actions of another officer, Michael Gentry, who had a troubled history, The Seattle Times reported. Gentry has since resigned from the Forks Police Department.
According to the lawsuit, Gentry confronted Hills and used a Taser on him within 78 seconds of arriving at the RV Court, where he lived. When Gentry arrived, Hills was talking to Clallam County Sheriff’s Sgt. Edwin Anderson, who also had responded and was trying to sort out and defuse the situation, according to court documents.
Hill had been standing in the doorway of his trailer talking to Anderson on Nov. 4, 2016, after a neighbor called police to report that Hills had been yelling all night and the neighbor was concerned about his mental health, according to reports.