A California county has agreed to pay $9.9 million to a Silicon Valley software engineer who was shot and paralyzed by a deputy when he charged at him with a carving fork.
Officials in Placer County finalized the payment – the largest in county history – this week to settle a federal lawsuit filed by Samuel Kolb, 50, and his relatives against the sheriff’s department, alleging excessive force and negligence, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Kolb, of San Mateo, Calif., was staying with his family at a cabin in Lake Tahoe in January 2018 when his 16-year-old son called 911 to say his father having some kind of “mental psychosis” and cited his history of temporal lobe epilepsy, court records show.
Kolb was later shot twice by a responding deputy, Curtis Honeycutt, after grabbing a carving fork inside the cabin. One of the bullets entered Kolb’s back, injuring his spine, court documents show.
Kolb’s son also testified that Honeycutt didn’t order his father to drop the fork prior to opening fire, the Los Angeles Times report.
Kolb, who now uses a wheelchair and colostomy bag, said he lives with pain all the time and cannot feel anything below his belly button.
“I would pay all the money plus interest to walk again,” he told the newspaper. “It changed everything about how I lived. I was athletic before … I skied, I played tennis, swam, ran and I was an active father.”
But the settlement, which spares the county of having to pay a larger verdict at trial, doesn’t provide a total sense of closure for Kolb, he said.
“There are no consequences for Sgt. Honeycutt,” Kolb told the newspaper of the deputy who retired in May.
Honeycutt could not be reached for comment, the Times reported. An attorney for the county, meanwhile, said a “wide range of risk factors” led to the decision to settle Kolb’s lawsuit.
Kolb was charged with assault with a deadly weapon and felony child endangerment following the shooting and later pleaded guilty to brandishing a deadly weapon other than a firearm as part of a plea deal, the newspaper reported.
Kolb, who now works at Facebook managing a team of engineers, said he took the deal because it involved no jail time. He’s also now advocating for widespread police reform throughout the country.
“This is a morally bankrupt and corrupt system that is bent on one thing, which is protecting the power of the entrenched police union and this power structure,” Kolb told the Associated Press.
A Placer County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman declined to comment on Kolb’s case Tuesday.
With Post wires
