Nate Monroe: FAMU student's death was tragic, not ammo for sheriff's political play

COMMENTARY | There were a lot of valuable lessons Jacksonville police and elected officials could have gleaned from the death of Jamee Johnson, a 22-year-old Florida A&M University student whom a Jacksonville sheriff's officer killed during a pretextual traffic stop in 2019, but years later, they've settled instead on a peculiar one: an expansion of Sheriff T.K. Waters' already vast powers.

Last fall, Waters fumed that the city allegedly failed to provide him "proper notification" of a $200,000 settlement with Johnson's parents, who had sued the city over the death of their son. Johnson's parents had originally sought $5 million, according to city records, and ultimately accepted far less — truly, a pittance. But Waters, who has reflexively defended what police call "use of force" during his tenure in office, apparently wanted to take the case to a jury. "I am deeply disappointed by the outcome of this litigation and JSO’s lack of proper notification by our attorneys," he said.

Waters and seven City Council co-sponsors are now pushing legislation that would effectively grant him veto power over such settlements in the future, placing the feelings of the city's top law enforcement leader above the kind of basic fiscal prudence that ordinarily guides these decisions. City attorneys, for example, were hardly sympathetic to Johnson or the federal complaint his parents had filed. They emphasized in writing multiple times what State Attorney Melissa Nelson had previously found: JSO acted properly that winter day in 2019, and Jacksonville Sheriff’s officer Josue Garriga's decision to kill Johnson was justified. City lawyers had simply concluded there was a substantial likelihood the city would spend more than $200,000 defending the lawsuit. In the future, if his legislation passes, Waters will get to override these concerns even though, in the end, he won't be the one burdened with making the hard budgetary choices necessary to pay the tab.

The provenance of this legislation is curious.

Waters went public with his frustration over the Johnson settlement in November, but by then, he had known about it for months. On Aug. 1, just a few days after city attorneys and the finance director had decided a settlement was the prudent decision — the only legal requirement needed to move forward for a settlement of that size — the city provided JSO leadership with the potential agreement, according to city records. Over the next two days, the agreement itself was finalized. There is no record Waters objected to the settlement in real time, and JSO did not answer a question about whether the sheriff tried to intervene at that point. In September, Johnson's parents and the city notified the federal judge overseeing the case they'd reached a settlement, and by November the judge dispensed with the case.

Waters, a media savvy sheriff who has taken a shining to appearing on camera, did not rush to the microphones last summer to denounce the settlement. He stayed quiet until reporters noticed the case's dismissal in November, at which point he apparently decided it had become a problem in need of legislative reform.

When he finally did speak up, Waters' comments — his "deep" disappointment and the alleged lack of "proper notification" — left a distinct impression he'd not only been blindsided by the settlement but that city officials had done something improper. This was wrong and misleading. City officials acted precisely as they were required to under the ordinance code, and Waters was in fact informed, regardless of whether he found that notification "proper." That Waters may have not found the settlement personally gratifying or believed it to have not sufficiently vindicated his officer's decision to kill Johnson were, as a legal matter, irrelevant, and in any case, his "deep" disappointment was apparently not so deep as to move him to action until the fall, months after he'd been told.

Settlement talks are also a standard part of federal litigation; civil cases, for one reason or another, rarely make it to a jury trial. Waters surely was aware of the lawsuit. Did he make any effort to get proactively involved given his apparent interest in the ultimate outcome?

The PR stunt had one other insidious effect: Years after Johnson's controversial death, it leaves one with the impression the victim in all of this — the party in need of some relief by city policy makers — is Waters. Not Johnson's parents. Certainly not Johnson himself. Not the other Jacksonville citizens subjected to pretextual stops that can quickly spin out of control, nor even JSO's rank-and-file, whose lives are put in danger during these entirely discretionary traffic stops. The critical faculties apparently begin and end with the sheriff's personal analysis of the situation; there is no greater reflection needed.

On the December day Garriga pulled over Johnson, law-enforcement officials described Garriga as having been part of a "violent crime reduction strategy" deployed in high-crime neighborhoods. These are fancy words that obscure the less sophisticated reality: Garriga pulled Johnson over for allegedly failing to wear a seatbelt, a common strategy that effectively lets police stop whoever they want for whatever reason they want. Of course, as is often the case, Johnson was wearing his seatbelt at the point Garriga's body camera began capturing footage, so who knows what the truth is.

By now, the rest of the story is pretty well known. The traffic stop escalated as Garriga claims he notices Johnson acting nervously and "moving about the car," whatever that means; it's not clear to me, watching the actual video footage, that Johnson is doing anything particularly remarkable much less "moving about the car," and in any case it seems pretty reasonable for anyone to feel a little nervous about being pulled over by a cop.

Johnson then discloses to Garriga that he has a gun in the car, at which point Garriga asks him to get out (though, oddly, never asks Johnson to turn the car off). Garriga then claims he sees marijuana flakes on Johnson's shirt, an invitation for Garriga to search the car. As Garriga is preparing to move Johnson to the back of his police cruiser for the search portion of the stop, the video ends.

The state attorney said Johnson "shoved" Garriga "so forcefully" the camera broke; at risk of endlessly litigating and nitpicking this now-years-old case, I must note the publicly available footage on Garriga's camera cuts to black before the encounter had turned physical at all.

Video footage from another officer partially shows the rest of the story: Johnson appears to lunge back into the car, where the gun he described remains. Garriga gets in a struggle with Johnson inside the still-running car, which begins accelerating forward. At some point during the struggle, Garriga shoots Johnson. For those critical moments inside the car, during which Garriga's camera is inoperable, Garriga's narrative about what happened is the primary evidence that exists and what the state attorney relied heavily on (while also concluding there was substantial corroborating evidence to back up Garriga's narrative).

After the shooting, footage shows Johnson on the ground pleading for help; the police waited at least two minutes for backup before rendering any aid. “Please don’t let me die,” he tells the officers. “Please don’t let me die, sir.” Johnson died a few hours later at UF Health.

Nelson, the state attorney, found Garriga and his colleagues acted appropriately that day: The shooting was justified and JSO officers did nothing improper in waiting for backup before helping Johnson after he'd been shot.

And all this for what? Johnson had no past criminal record. Prosecutors noted police found "nearly ten times" the felony amount of marijuana in his car and a digital scale. OK, so a college student might have been selling pot. Was it worth it?

But why did he resist? One doesn't need to believe Johnson acted wisely that day to also believe his death was tragic and unnecessary. This is, heartbreakingly, a reality Johnson's own mother has been forced to acknowledge. “I’m not saying he did everything right that day. I’m not saying he did everything wrong that day, but he didn’t deserve to die,” Kimberly Strickland, Johnson's mother, told Action News last year, after Waters had complained about the settlement.

But choose the narrative you want: whose life — Johnson's or Garriga's — was worth putting at risk for this traffic stop? Are there truly no other lessons here?

It was an ugly encounter made uglier as the years have gone on. In 2022, Garriga was part of a group chat among members of a JSO gang unit that was scrutinized after a Black member of the unit felt insulted by some of the texts from his colleagues. One member shared a link to a story about an NFL ceremony honoring Johnson, prompting Garriga to text the group: "Why are they recognizing that clown?" He added, after more texts from his colleagues, "Goes to show no matter how wrong they are, they still will be recognized just because they are Black."

When evaluating the federal complaint Johnson's parents filed over their son's death, city attorneys noted his parents' lawyer found a witness and a ballistics expert who were willing to challenge JSO's version of events. Even while casting doubt on those two, city lawyers reasonably concluded Johnson's parents might have had just enough to push the case past a motion to dismiss — the point at which the city's legal bills would begin to pile up. There was nothing improper in that conclusion. And while the written analysis by city attorneys made no mention of the texts in the group chat among JSO gang unit members, it's tempting to believe they were not helpful for the city's case.

Two-hundred thousand for a life: Using that as the basis for a power play, or for cheap politics, is offensive gaslighting. It is a tragedy, and it doesn't belong to Sheriff T.K. Waters.

Nate Monroe is a metro columnist whose work regularly appears every Thursday and Sunday. Follow him on Twitter @NateMonroeTU.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Nate Monroe: It's wrong to use FAMU student's death for cheap politics