Charlotte man who lost fingers in George Floyd protest is dropping claims against police
Clarification: This story was updated on Nov. 21 to better explain that while the lawsuit alleged the grenade came from police, the city’s position was that there was no evidence that it did.
A Charlotte man who alleged he lost some of his fingers when police threw a grenade into an uptown crowd protesting after the 2020 murder of George Floyd has decided to drop his lawsuit against the city and its officers.
Attorneys for the city had argued there was no evidence that whatever caused the injury came from police.
Kyre Mitchell’s right hand is missing its middle and ring fingers. They were blown off in May 2020 when a “flashbang” grenade detonated in his hand, his lawsuit alleged. An officer had thrown it into a bottleneck of protesters, and Mitchell had picked it up to toss it away, according to the federal lawsuit filed in January 2023 by the then 29-year-old Charlotte-area artist, dancer and photographer.
Mitchell, in a joint filing with the city and the police department, on Tuesday asked the U.S. District Court for the Western District Court of North Carolina to dismiss the case. The case was not settled outside the court, said Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department spokesperson Evan White.
A federal judge had previously rejected parts of Mitchell’s complaint — including his demand that Charlotte stop using the flashbang grenades — but allowed a First Amendment portion of the lawsuit to move forward. His filing Tuesday asked the court to dismiss that portion, too.
Mitchell rightfully argued that the protests were a “protected First Amendment activity,” the magistrate judge previously wrote. The grenade was thrown “in an area that contained peaceful protesters and bystanders” who never “engaged in any activity that could be considered violent,” according to court documents.
The city argued that the First Amendment claims should be dismissed, saying the protests met the definition of a riot and police were authorized under law to use crowd control tactics (like the grenade).
The judge said that argument was premature.
The riot-like “instances were rare, were done by individuals who could have been singled out for removal from the protest, and ... no incident occurred justifying CMPD to character the protests as an unlawful assembly or to use widespread, indiscriminate force against the crowd of demonstrators,” she wrote in March.
Mitchell won’t be able to refile his First Amendment claims, according to court documents, and he will have to cover his own attorney costs.
The dismissal documents do not explain why Mitchell asked to drop the case.
In 2023, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department spokeswoman Sandy D’Elosua said police only learned of the incident a year after the protests and that CMPD had “no reports to our knowledge indicating this was an incident and/or investigation.”
In court documents, the city previously argued that Mitchell’s lawyers were unable to definitively say the person who threw the grenade was an officer. They were simply speculating, the city wrote.
Lawyers representing the city and Mitchell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
This story was originally published November 20, 2024 at 1:14 PM.
