DETROIT (WWJ) - A settlement has been reached in a civil case over the shooting death 7-year old girl during a Detroit police raid in 2010.
WWJ's Charlie Langton reported Thursday that family of Aiyana Stanley-Jones and the City of Detroit settled the wrongful death lawsuit for $8.25 million, pending the approval of City Council.
Stanley-Jones was shot in the head as she slept on a couch in her east side home early morning in the morning of May 16, 2010, as a SWAT team raided the house looking for a murder suspect.
The child's death made national headlines, attracting attention from civil rights leaders such as the Rev. Al Sharpton, who delivered the eulogy at her funeral.
While witnesses said officers fired a flash-bang grenade through a window and then burst in shooting, Officer Joseph Weekley insisted he accidentally fired his submachine gun during a struggle with the child's grandmother. Police took the grandma into custody and administered tests for gunpowder and drugs, but she was released hours later.
The raid was being filmed for the documentary-style A&E show “The First 48"; and family members believe that officers were more concerned about how they looked on TV than they were about conducting their police work properly.
Following the child's death, then-Detroit Mayor Dave Bing banned TV crews from going out with police.
In a criminal case, Weekley was charged with involuntary manslaughter, but a mistrial was declared in June of 2013 when a jury failed to reach a consensus. The manslaughter charge was then dismissed by a judge, leaving only a misdemeanor count of careless discharge causing injury or death.
Following a second mistrial in October of 2014, again due to a deadlocked jury, Wayne County Prosecutor Kym Worthy said the case against Weekley would not move ahead.
Separately, Chauncey Owens, whom police were looking for that infamous morning, was eventually arrested in the second-floor unit of the duplex where Stanley-Jones lived.
Owens was later convicted of murdering 17-year-old Je'rean Blake, who was fatally shot outside a party store on May 10, 2010. Stanley-Jones's father, Charles Jones, was also arrested and convicted of second-degree murder for providing the gun used to kill Blake.