Las Vegas police will pay $3.5M to settle 2 lawsuits
Las Vegas police agreed to settle two federal lawsuits on Monday for more than $3.5 million.
The Metropolitan Police Committee on Fiscal Affairs approved a $1.75 million payment to the family of Jason Dickman, who was strangled by his cellmate at the Clark County Detention Center in May 2021. The man’s father, Richard Dickman, sued the Metropolitan Police Department, which operates the jail, for wrongful death.
The department also approved a $1.8 million settlement with Jasmine King, who sued Metro in July alleging assault and battery and violation of her rights against excessive police force.
Richard Dickman said his son was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia and should have been in a unit meant for people with severe mental illness, rather than a general population cell with Sergio Dominguez, who took off his shirt to choke the man to death.
Dickman had been jailed for a graffiti violation, his father said.
He told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in January 2022 that former Assistant Sheriff Andrew Walsh called to tell him about his son’s death.
“He said, ‘We failed your son, and we failed you,’ ” Richard Dickman said Walsh told him.
In the second settlement, King will receive $11.5 million, including $1.8 million from Metro and the rest from the department’s insurance company.
King said she and her 7-year-old daughter were inside their south Las Vegas home in January 2021 when officers attempted to conduct a search warrant for evidence about a man who did not live with them.
Officers used an explosive to blow her door off. King alleged in the suit that she had “suffered serious injuries, including permanent damage to her eyes,” after the explosion. King was blinded completely in one eye and is partially blind in the other, according to her attorney, Joshua Benson.
In notes for the committee’s agenda, the department wrote that the device prematurely detonated, striking King’s face.
Benson wrote in a message to the Review-Journal that King and her daughter still live with trauma from the explosion.
“Although the case is over for Metro, Jasmine has to live with these damages the rest of her life,” Benson wrote. “And that’s a daily struggle that should never be forgotten. The emotional stress of two years of litigation does not simply go away.”
Contact Sabrina Schnur at sschnur@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0278. Follow @sabrina_schnur on Twitter.
A previous version of this story incorrectly named the officers involved in King’s lawsuit.