Shooting death of Black teen leads to one of the largest police settlements ever

A 16-year-old Black teenager ran for his life from a gunman in downtown San Diego.

Moments later, he was shot in the back by a police officer who thought he was the threat.

Now, as reporter Melissa Adan explains, the City of San Diego is prepared to pay his parents $30 million, one of the largest police settlements in U.S. history, for a killing that never should have happened in the first place.

A Teen Running From Gunfire, Not Toward It

According to Melissa Adan’s report for ABC News, the shooting happened in late January near a downtown depot area in San Diego.

Police had been dispatched on a call of a shooting.

Surveillance video, shown in Adan’s segment, captured a 16-year-old running away from the scene of that gunfire.

Adan explains that the teen, whose name is not given in the segment, was actually the victim of the initial shooting, not the gunman.

He was trying to get away from bullets when San Diego police arrived.

When officers pulled up, Adan says they saw the teenager running from what they believed was an “alleged shooting.”

One of those officers – identified in Adan’s report as Officer Daniel Gold – fired, striking the teen in the back.

The lawyer-host of the YouTube channel Lawyer Explains Stuff underscores that point even more bluntly.

He tells his viewers that the boy was “running away from a shooter trying to get to safety, only to be gunned down by another shooter, a police officer who didn’t even announce himself as police before firing.”

The teen was later pronounced dead at the hospital, Adan reports.

For his family, that single misunderstanding destroyed a life and reshaped theirs forever.

How A Call For Help Turned Into A Fatal Mistake

Adan notes that San Diego officers responded as they normally would for a shooting call: fast, high-alert, and looking for a suspect.

But the critical detail, as both Adan and the lawyer-host emphasize, is that officers misidentified the fleeing teen as the threat instead of recognizing him as the victim.

The lawyer-host points out that, based on the reporting, the officer did not identify himself as police before opening fire.

If that’s accurate, it means the teen had no clear warning or instruction — only the instinct to run away from the first person shooting at him.

Adan says that after Officer Gold shot the teen, he moved in and attempted to render aid.

Despite those efforts, the teenager died from his injuries at the hospital.

San Diego police later arrested the actual suspect in the original shooting that the teen was trying to escape, Adan reports.

That detail drives home how badly the situation was misread in the moment: the real shooter was somewhere else, and the only person killed was the kid running for cover.

From a distance, this is the kind of “split-second decision” police departments often describe.

Up close, as these sources lay it out, it looks much more like a failure of identification and a failure of patience – both of which ended in a death that did not need to happen.

A $30 Million Settlement – And What It Actually Means

Adan reports that the City of San Diego is set to pay $30 million to the teen’s parents.

She notes that this would be one of the largest police settlements in U.S. history.

The attorney host of Lawyer Explains Stuff calls it “one of the largest police settlements in history” and reminds his viewers that this kind of payout is usually a business decision, not an admission of guilt.

In other words, the city is effectively saying: it is cheaper and safer to settle for $30 million than to take this to trial and risk losing in public, where a jury might award even more and where every decision leading up to the shooting would be dissected.

The lawyer-host argues that this is precisely why officers should be required to carry individual liability insurance.

Right now, he explains, cities typically carry insurance or self-insure, meaning taxpayers absorb the financial hit from police misconduct.

If officers had their own policies, he says, “bad cops can’t get insurance at all, so they can’t be police officers,” or their premiums would become so high that the job would no longer be tenable for those with repeated incidents.

It’s a controversial suggestion, but it matches the scale of the problem this case illustrates.

When a single encounter can end one teenager’s life and cost a city $30 million, the status quo is clearly not cheap – morally or financially.

What The Law May Say About The Officer’s Actions

Adan reports that the shooting is still being reviewed by the San Diego County District Attorney’s Office, which will decide whether Officer Gold bears any criminal liability.

She adds that the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office are also monitoring the investigation, and that San Diego Police Department’s Internal Affairs unit is conducting its own review to see if any policies were violated.

The lawyer-host breaks down what potential criminal charges could look like under general legal principles.

He says that in many states, an officer in this position might face a range of possibilities, including murder or voluntary manslaughter, depending on the facts and the state’s laws.

He explains voluntary manslaughter in the context of “imperfect self-defense” – situations in which someone believes they need to use deadly force but that belief is unreasonable given the actual threat.

That makes it an intentional killing built on an “unreasonable mistake of fact” that, if it had been reasonable and true, might have justified the shooting.

The key word, he stresses, is “unreasonable.”

A reasonable mistake of fact can sometimes be a defense to certain crimes; an unreasonable one can land you in prison.

In this case, the question is straightforward but brutal: Was it reasonable to shoot a teenager in the back while he was running away, without clearly identifying yourself as police, and without confirming that he was the shooter rather than the victim?

If the answer is no, then the legal problem is not just tragic – it’s criminal.

‘Officer Safety’ Versus Everyone Else’s Safety

The lawyer-host uses this case to launch a wider critique of police training and culture.

He argues that officers are repeatedly taught that their number one priority is “officer safety,” often to the exclusion of the safety of the public.

He describes how officers are trained to see everyone as a threat and everything as a weapon, walking into every situation with a “war mentality” instead of a guardian mindset.

He frames it in terms of two types of errors:

• Mistakenly thinking someone is a threat when they are not, and
• Mistakenly thinking someone is not a threat when they are.

According to him, law enforcement culture heavily prioritizes eliminating the second error – missing a real threat – even if that means making far more of the first kind: shooting or attacking people who were never dangerous in the first place.

He points to other incidents he’s covered where officers mistook a camera for a gun, a gas nozzle for a gun, and even a falling acorn for gunfire to illustrate how jumpy some officers have become.

In this San Diego case, he says, the teenager did exactly what any normal person would do: he ran away from gunfire.

“There’s nothing he could have done to prevent this,” the lawyer-host insists. “The only one who could have prevented this was the cop.”

That’s a harsh assessment, but it fits the facts as laid out by Adan and the legal analysis the host provides.

If you can be killed for running away from danger, the question becomes: what, exactly, are civilians supposed to do when bullets start flying?

A Settlement That Doesn’t Fix What’s Broken

Adan notes that the internal and external investigations are still ongoing, nearly a year after the shooting.

The lawyer-host reacts with open frustration at that timeline, arguing that if a civilian had shot and killed a police officer, the investigation “would be finished in two seconds,” not drawn out over many months.

He also underscores that the settlement itself, as large as it is, does not bring back the teenager or fix the problem that got him killed.

It simply closes one chapter of liability for the city.

From a broader perspective, this case sits at the intersection of several unresolved issues:

how police are trained to assess threats, how quickly they resort to deadly force, how rarely individual officers face personal financial consequences, and how often families are left mourning a loved one while being told that “policy” was followed.

What’s striking about the way Adan and the lawyer-host present this case is how ordinary the teenager’s behavior was.

He wasn’t charging at anyone, brandishing a weapon, or confronting officers. He was fleeing someone else’s bullets.

That is exactly what parents would tell their kids to do.

And yet, for this family, the decision to run toward safety ended at a hospital, a funeral, and a $30 million settlement that cannot possibly feel like justice.

At best, it is an expensive acknowledgment that something is deeply wrong with the way too many officers read threats – and with a system that keeps asking taxpayers to pay for mistakes, while families pay with the people they love.