The city council of Kenosha, Wisconsin, denied Jacob Blake’s claim for damages over the injuries he sustained when he was shot by a police officer outside of an apartment complex last summer.
Though such claims are capped at $50,000 per state law, lawyers for Blake, who was left partially paralyzed by the shooting, submitted an itemized list of “special damages” totaling nearly $777,000, according to a report on Thursday from the Kenosha News.
The council voted 17-0 on Monday to deny his claim without comment or deliberation.
City Administrator John Morrissey said Blake’s claim request to the city council could simply be a formality allowing him to file a lawsuit for the damages.
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“This is just a claim. I don’t know whether they’ll file a state lawsuit,” he said on Thursday. “The maximum exposure for a municipality is $50,000.”
Blake’s attorneys have already filed a federal lawsuit on his behalf seeking an unspecified amount that names Kenosha Police Officer Rusten Sheskey, the officer who shot him, as the sole defendant.
“The federal civil rights suit is being pursued, and the potential state claim, essentially the same cause of action with caps on damages, would be superfluous of it. We are considering options,” Blake’s legal team said in a Thursday statement.
Blake, who is black, was shot in the back by Sheskey, who is white, on Aug. 23 seven times as police were responding to a call about a domestic disturbance. The moments leading up to the shooting were captured on video by a bystander.
Blake’s lawsuit noted that he did have a knife in his possession at the time of the shooting but that “at no time” did he attempt to “point the knife in the officers’ direction.”
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“Very important — Jacob Blake, while actively resisting, arms himself with a knife. … It is absolutely incontrovertible that Jacob Blake was armed with a knife during this encounter,” District Attorney Michael Graveley said during a press conference on Jan. 5. “Incontrovertible. Most incontrovertible because Jacob Blake, in all of the times he spoke to DCI, admits he possessed a knife.”
The shooting resulted in days of protests and rioting in the city. Sheskey has since returned to work with Kenosha’s police force after being cleared of any criminal wrongdoing in January.
