A Burlington mother won a $150,000 settlement against the City of Burlington over claims that her son, who is Black and has behavioral and intellectual disabilities, faced excessive use of force and racial discrimination from the Burlington Police Department, the teen’s lawyers announced Thursday.
The lawsuit, which Cathy Austrian filed more than two years ago on behalf of her son, stems from a 2021 incident in which police officers restrained the then-14-year-old. Police called in paramedics, who covered the boy’s head with a mesh bag and injected him with ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, in order to retrieve electronic vapes he had stolen.
While the case was settled before going to trial, court documents indicate an oversight commission’s report found evidence that the officers acted discriminatorily and excessively, and a Vermont judge rejected Burlington’s initial attempts to dismiss the lawsuit.
“This settlement allows them to close a chapter, but really the story of the fight for police accountability isn’t over,” Hillary Rich, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Vermont, told VTDigger, referring to the mother and son.
The ACLU and the law firm Latham & Watkins LLP represented Austrian in her lawsuit. The settlement was reached on May 14 and on Thursday the case was dismissed.
In 2021, Austrian had called the police on her son after learning that he had stolen vape pens from a local convenience store, according to the lawsuit. When he did not hand over the vapes to two officers, Kelsey Johnson and Sergio Caldieri, they escalated the encounter, Austrian alleged in court files.
According to body camera footage, the officers restrained the teenager to forcibly take the vapes. The son, identified in court documents as “J.A.,” then lunged at the officers with his arms swinging, after which the officers pinned him to the ground and called in paramedics for the injection, body camera footage shows.
The lawsuit sought an unspecified monetary amount for the physical and emotional damages to the teen as well as punitive damages against the city. Rich, the ACLU attorney, described the $150,000 as a “large” settlement that reflects “how grievous and extreme the harm was in this case.”
“From the time that this incident had happened, the city really dug its heels in that its officers had done nothing wrong,” Rich said.
The city sought to dismiss the lawsuit, claiming that the officers “conducted a reasonable search and seizure.” Vermont Superior Judge Helen Toor rejected the motion to dismiss in August 2024, finding the allegations supported a claim of excessive use of force under the Vermont Constitution and were “more than sufficient to support a claim of racial discrimination on a motion to dismiss.”
The Burlington Mayor’s office declined to comment on the settlement Thursday, and the Burlington city attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The city’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit came as the Burlington Police Commission, a body tasked with oversight of the department, disagreed with the city’s assessment, instead finding that the officers violated several department policies in their handling of the incident. Their findings came as a result of Austrian submitting a complaint to the police department following the episode.
The commission presented their recommendations to then-Police Chief Jon Murad, according to court documents, who rejected the recommendations, concluding that the officers’ handling constituted an appropriate use of force and did not violate department rules.
“The commission was absolutely outraged. We were unanimous in our decisions,” Commissioner Stephanie Seguino told VTDigger on Thursday.
If the department had been more receptive to the recommendations, the probability of similar police enforcement incidents occurring again could have been reduced, and taxpayer dollars could have been saved, Seguino said.
“I am glad that (J.A.) got some justice in this case, but on the other hand, nothing that happened here prevents this kind of situation from happening again,” Seguino said.
For the ACLU, the police department’s handling of the incident reflects a pattern of discrimination they have alleged for years. The Burlington Police Department previously settled a lawsuit brought by a group of Black men who alleged excessive force in 2018, and a separate lawsuit by the family of a man with a mental illness who was shot by police in 2013.
“We have spent five years fighting to hold Burlington accountable for the harm their officials caused my child, but we can’t make changes alone,” Austrian said, according to a statement in an ACLU press release. “If you in the community want to ensure other families won’t have to endure this kind of pain and lasting trauma, it’s now up to you to raise your voice and seek changes to this deeply flawed system.”
