The family of a Fairfax County man who was fatally shot by a Fairfax police officer in 2022 filed a wrongful-death lawsuit Wednesday against the Fairfax police chief and the three officers involved, alleging that they acted rashly and were unprepared to deal with a mentally troubled person.
The parents and sister of Jasper Aaron Lynch, 26, called 911 twice on the evening of July 7, 2022, reporting that Lynch was having an episode unlike anything they had seen before, breaking pictures and hurling household items in the family’s McLean home. Lynch had struggled for years with his transgender transition, and when his family spoke to him on the phone that day, they said they immediately became alarmed at his deteriorating mental state.
At first, a specially trained officer arrived with a mental health clinician, but they couldn’t find Lynch, police said. When Lynch’s twin sister arrived soon after, she said Lynch told her to call 911 for help.
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This time, three officers who were not specially trained arrived without a clinician, police reports state. When Lynch charged at one of the officers, waving a wine bottle, another officer shot him four times, including once in the neck from less than two feet away, a police auditor’s report stated. Lynch died just outside the front door of his parents’ home on Arbor Lane with his sister standing nearby.
A county spokesman said Wednesday that Fairfax did not comment on pending litigation. The Fairfax commonwealth’s attorney in April ruled that the shooting, by Officer Edward George, was legally justified because George reasonably feared that the other officer could have been bludgeoned with the wine bottle or stabbed with a broken piece of the bottle. Lynch apparently dropped the bottle before he was shot, but George couldn’t see that in the dark, the prosecutor said.
Patrick Regan, a lawyer for the Lynches, said the suit was filed “because so far the police department has refused to take responsibility for senselessly killing this young man.” He said that he planned to take sworn testimony “from everyone involved,” and that a top policing expert would testify that “there was no need for the officer to fire the fatal shot.”
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In a county of 1.1 million, Fairfax County police had shot no more than two people in any year dating back to 2015. But officers shot six people in 2022, two fatally, and then an officer shot and killed an alleged shoplifter at Tysons Corner in early 2023, leading Chief Kevin Davis to commission an outside study of officer shootings. The study, by the Police Executive Research Forum, said in April 2023 that only one-third of the department had received detailed training in handling people in crisis who don’t have a gun, called Integrating Communications, Assessment, and Tactics, or ICAT.
Fairfax County police said last month that their entire department has now received ICAT training, and 44 percent have completed crisis-intervention training, which provides more in-depth guidance on handling people who are experiencing mental health problems. About 20 percent of all fatal police shootings nationwide in recent years involved people in mental health crisis, according to a Washington Post database.
The police also said that they now had eight “co-responder teams” available around-the-clock, involving one officer and one mental health clinician from the county’s Community Services Board. No clinician was present when the three officers tased and fatally shot Lynch, police said.
The lawsuit, which seeks compensatory and punitive damages, alleges that the three officers were negligent in using deadly force when it wasn’t reasonably necessary, and by entering the home without waiting for mental health professionals or making a plan to deal with Lynch. Davis is accused of not properly developing training and policies for dealing with someone in mental health crisis.
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Two prior Fairfax County police shootings resulted in large payments to the victim’s family. After John Geer was shot as he stood unarmed in the front doorway of his Springfield home in 2013, the county paid his family $2.95 million, and Officer Adam Torres pleaded guilty to manslaughter. In 2011, the county paid $2 million to the family of optometrist Salvatore J. Culosi, who was standing unarmed outside an undercover officer’s truck when he was shot by Officer Deval Bullock. Culosi’s killing was ruled justifiable by the Fairfax prosecutor.
The second criminal prosecution of a Fairfax officer for a fatal shooting, in which Sgt. Wesley Shifflett killed Timothy Johnson, is set for trial in September. No civil suit has been filed in that case.
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