CHICAGO (WBBM NEWSRADIO) - A 15-year-old girl who was run over by a Chicago Police car during the 2020 George Floyd protests is set to receive a large settlement.
On the agenda for Monday’s City Council Finance Committee meeting is a $525,000 proposed settlement to the family of Astarte Washington.
Washington ran into a group of protesters near 111th and Michigan as she and her brother were trying to catch a bus.
That’s according to her family’s lawsuit that said after she complied with police orders to get on the ground, she was run over by a squad car that an officer failed to put in park.
The lawsuit they filed said she suffered a hip fracture when an officer failed to put his squad car in park and ran over the eighth grader.
She was lying on the ground because police had ordered everyone in the area to do so.
Robert Fakhouri, an attorney representing the Washington family, acknowledged CPD officers were under tremendous pressure that fateful day while trying to control the unruly and violent crowd — but that doesn’t “justify an officer’s recklessness in responding to that scene.”
The officer “is responsible for ensuring that the mayhem is controlled” but also “liable for the mayhem that they create,” Fakhouri said.
“In responding to the scene ... they created mayhem,” he added. “There’s no justification or excuse.”
There was no looting in the area , the attorney said. Video evidence shows there was “more a police presence than there were civilians” in the area, the attorney said.
Astarte “not only complied” with the officer’s order, Fakhouri said, but was “in such fear, being someone who grew up on the South Side of Chicago” that she obeyed the police because she believed “should she not have, she may have lost her life.”
Chicago Sun-Times Media Wire/Fran Spielman contributed to this report.
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