With the six-year anniversary of Deon Kay’s police-involved death on the horizon, the Kay family has finalized a settlement agreement with D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb, thus ending what’s been described as a months-long disagreement about a suitable dollar amount.
For Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner Dascha Cleckley, this development provides some sort of closure, not only for the Kay family, but for Congress Heights residents.
“It doesn’t even make the community feel safe, but at least it acknowledges the fact that there was a wrong,” said Cleckley, who’s in her fourth year as a representative of Single-Member District 8C03. “So many times, things happen in the community,…and it’s swept up under the rug, so I think that’s a move in the right direction.”
Years after Kay’s death, as federal law enforcement officers and National Guard troops walk the streets of Congress Heights alongside D.C. police officers, and activists fight the launch of a new Department of Homeland Security headquarters, Cleckley says that tensions have increased.
“It’s worse, because now you have a whole bunch of people that are trained for combat that are in the neighborhood and looking at the community members as if they’re insurgents,” Cleckley told The Informer. “It doesn’t help that you have the president…working against the community boldly saying that he doesn’t care [and] boldly showing that he doesn’t care.”
In September of 2020, well before President Donald J. Trump launched the D.C. Safe & Beautiful Task Force, Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) Officer Alexander Alvarez shot and killed Kay in the parking lot of an apartment building located on the 200 block of Orange Street SE.
Redacted body camera footage showed Kay, who was sitting in a car, running away upon officers’ arrival to the scene. During the chase, Alvarez intercepted Kay’s path and shot him in the chest. Seconds later, after Kay fell to the ground, Alvarez can be heard frantically looking for a gun that officers later said they found 98 feet away from Kay.
Following Kay’s death, family members, residents, and activists gathered along Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue SE in demand of justice.
“There were a lot of community members that reached out to me,” Cleckley recounted. “They wanted to send me the video and send me information regarding that.”
Cleckley, a Gen Xer and daughter of the Rev. Wanda Cleckley, grew up on Mellon Street SE, just two streets over from what community members now call Deon’s Lot. As a youngster, she and her mother served food in the park at the intersection of Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue and Malcolm X Avenue SE, not far from where Rev. Cleckley often preached to her congregation.
During those days, Cleckley said, police officers had a posture much more congenial than what Black residents currently experience.
“They have switched up the dynamic of the police department, where you have a bunch of police officers that have no idea who the community is and don’t care,” Cleckley said. “They don’t look like us, they don’t think like us. They have no idea what’s going on in the community, therefore there’s no trust. With that, there is an abuse of power because you’re not trained to be empathetic, you’re trained to kill.”
Delving Into Negotiations Around the Final Settlement
Though Alvarez never received criminal charges in Kay’s death, a civil jury awarded the Kay family $655,000 last year. Schwalb’s office appealed the judgment shortly after, sparking calls among activists, including those affiliated with Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, for the attorney general to reverse course.
Sources familiar with the situation said that Schwalb and Kay’s family agreed to an amount less than what the jury awarded but greater than what Schwalb is allowed to approve on his own. Per the source, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser okayed the agreement.
For the attorney general’s office, the outcome met the needs of both parties.
“We appealed because we believed the trial court made significant errors that affected the outcome of the case,” said Gabriel Shoglow-Rubenstein, a D.C. Office of the Attorney General (OAG) spokesperson. “Though no dollar amount can ever bring back Mr. Kay, this agreement provides a significant monetary payment to his family in addition to vacating the original judgment.”
Yaida Ford, the Kay family’s attorney, had a slightly different take.
“She gave the green light, but it came at a cost,” Ford said about Bowser. “That’s the bittersweet thing about all of this. While she agreed to give more to end the use of taxpayer money in the case, we still couldn’t get the full judgment because [Schwalb] had an appeal filed.”
As Ford recounted, Bowser became involved in negotiations during the latter part of July, after Ford reached out to the mayor. The final amount, Ford said, shows that Bowser was willing to go well beyond what Schwalb agreed to during negotiations.
“Mayor Bowser hasn’t been a friend or a foe to the trial lawyers because she supports $500,000 caps on any lawsuit against the city,” Ford told The Informer. “In this case, the fact that we could appeal to a higher power who agreed with us was a relief, but it wasn’t a guarantee. I really didn’t know that that would happen, but I think that it says that the executive has more fiscal judgment than the attorney general does.”
Bowser declined to speak about the OAG’s settlement with the Kay family, nor did she weigh in on the taxpayer dollars used to appeal the original judgment. However, when it came to her alleged dealings with Ford, Bowser kept it short.
“I don’t talk to attorneys,” she told The Informer.
Local Clergy Gather to Honor Deon Kay and Give a Call to Action
On the evening of Aug. 18 — more than a week after what would’ve been Kay’s 24th birthday — Ford and a group of local clergy gathered at Deon’s Lot, the scene of the police-involved shooting that claimed his life.
That’s where Ford, with the Kay family, activists, and community members within earshot, announced the finalization of the negotiations. It’s also where religious leaders lamented what it took to get the six-figure amount.
“To have a servant of the community decide for himself that that was too much money awarded…has to feel like a second death all over again,” said Rahim Jenkins of the National Center for Juvenile Justice Reform. “Justice delayed is justice denied, but in this instance, there’s the process of mourning that has been delayed. No closure for this family, and then to be willing to negotiate a lesser fee based on no sound evidence that there were any improprieties is problematic in and of itself.”
Jenkins stood in a group that included: Nee Nee Taylor of Harriet’s Wildest Dreams, Dr. Josephine Mourning of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Rev. George C. Gilbert Jr. of Holy Trinity United Baptist Church, Bishop Andre Gray of Agape Men’s Fellowship, Steven Park of Little Lights Urban Ministries, and the Rev. Anthony Radcliff of Embry African Methodist Episcopal Church.
For an hour, leaders of Christian and Islamic faiths took to a mic, tying Kay’s death and Schwalb’s appeal of the original judgment to conditions affecting residents in Black communities. For the Rev. Michael C. Bell of Peace Baptist Church in Northeast, the final judgment does not absolve the D.C. government of its responsibilities, nor does it deter community leaders from their mission.
“We will not dare sit idly by and allow you to haggle over the life of a young man who was taken from our community to devalue a young man whose future remained bright,” Bell said. “Together we will give voice until, as it has already been said, that the justice stream will flow and righteousness like a mighty stream….This is not an event or a one-off. Justice is a lifetime pursuit, and we as the people of faith are committed to the sacred work of resistance.”
